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I know that in Western Europe and the US, CP-1252 is the default character encoding.

How about default character encoding in other windows version?

In addition, recently I hear that windows 8 use UTF-8 as default character encoding, is this correct?

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    The encoding is going to be appropriate for the default language. Your asking a very broad question that doesn't have a single answer. Where did you hear that Windows 8 uses UTF-8 character encoding?Unicode and Additional Information
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 3:05
  • Is there any where has these information, like an MSDN page? That's enough for the answer.
    – teddy
    Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 3:07
  • Feel free to do your own searches. I had no problem finding the information myself.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 18, 2014 at 3:08

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Windows intrinsically uses the UTF-16 encoding. The “default encodings”, or “default codepages” in Microsoft terminology, are just legacy encoding that are used by many old programs. E.g., in Notepad, the default encoding when saving a file is “ANSI”, which (rather misleadingly) denotes the default codepage (but Notepad internally works with UTF-16).

The system locale determines the default codepage. The page Windows Locale Codes - Sortable list shows the mapping and is probably reliable. (I was unable to find a Microsoft page on this.)

In particular, web browsers tend to use the default codepage so determined as the encoding of a web page, if encoding information is not available. In reality, it’s more complicated. In HTML5 LC, section Determining the character encoding describes (and prescribes) the process, and it also contains a mapping table that largely reflects the Windows mappings from locales to codepages.

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