I'm trying to gain a basic understanding of what is meant by a Windows code page. I kind of get the feeling it's a translation between a given 8 bit value and some 'abstraction' for a given character graphic.

I made the following experiment. I created a "" character literal with two versions of the letter u with an umlaut. One created using the ALT 129 (uses code page 437) value and one using the ALT 0252 (uses code page 1252) value. When I examined the literal both characters had the value 252.

Is 252 the universal 8 bit abstraction for u with an umlaut? Is it the Unicode value?

Aside from keyboard input are there any library routines or system calls that use code pages? For example is there a function to translate a string using a given code table (as above for the ALT 129 value)?