Web sites giving the values of Alt codes more often than not are produced by ignoramuses who have no idea about code pages or character sets. Some installing programs make this change and some individuals make it because they feel that Code page 850 or Code page 858 better fits their use of the computer. So a file can more likely be translated from one to the other without losing information, This is sometimes done because Code page 437 is missing accented characters that are usually thought to be more necessary in common business use and Code pages 850 and 858 contain all the characters from the ISO Latin-1 alphabet (although recoded) which was the basis of Code page 1252. You obviously have either Code page 850 or Code page 858 installed instead of Code page 437. When the Euro system was invented, Microsoft invented yet another DOS code page which they called 858 which was identical to Code page 850, except that it included instead of ı, the dotless i. In this code page character 236 has the value ý.

The DOS code page that most closely resembles Windows code page 1252 was originally Code page 850.

Windows Code page 1252 covers western European languages and is the normal Windows code page installed on computers where the language is set to a form of English. īut Microsoft later invented other code pages for different languages or to be more similar to the Windows code page 1252.

In this character set, character 236 is ∞. What it does make clear is that not all keyboard/character layouts are the same.Ĭode page 437 is the original MS-DOS character set on the PC.

I copied the following extract from a Yahoo answers screen, some of it is interesting, some of it is understandable.

Infinity symbol on keyboard windows