Suppose you walk up to a computer running the Icelandic edition of a popular operating system, start up a text editor, enter some Icelandic text, and save the result as a text file. To you, the text file consists of a series of letters, numbers, punctuation, control codes, such as the carriage return, and other characters. But to the computer, the text file consists of a series of numeric values, each of which corresponds to a particular character. For the computer to interpret the numeric values correctly, it needs a code page table that associates each numeric value with the corresponding character. Code pages play key roles in applications to be adapted to multiple locales.
