What is "code page"

n. (context computing English) (alternative spelling of codepage English)

In computing, a code page is a table of values that describes the character set used for encoding a particular set of glyphs, usually combined with a number of control characters. The term "code page" originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems, but many vendors use this term, including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Corporation. Vendors often allocate their own code page number to a character encoding, even if it is better known by another name (for example UTF-8 character encoding has code page numbers 1208 at IBM, 65001 at Microsoft, 4110 at SAP). The multitude of code page assignments leads many vendors to recommend Unicode.