by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/07/05 06:01 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/07/04/3697289.aspx
(Forgive the Nicol Williamson riff!)
There is a difference between the official ISO 8859-7 standard (which provides an 8-bit code page for Greek) and the version of 8859-7 that Microsoft provides (via code page 28597).
Well, they used to be the same, once upon a time.
But then in 2003, as Jukka Korpela describes in this excellent resource page, the ISO standard was updated to add two entries for previously unassigned code points:
0xA4 0x20AC # EURO SIGN
0xA5 0x20AF # DRACHMA SIGN
People might notice that this is the very sort of thing that Microsoft used to do from time to time that pissed people off -- modifying code pages. In fact, the wide update to add U+20ac to almost all of the Windows "ANSI" code pages did meet with some complaints, which is funny since the very same change happened in the ISO code page too.
In a way, it is unfortunate that we learned our lesson here -- updating 128597 really isn't an option at this point.
Though everyone ought to be using Unicode anyway. :-)
This post brought to you by € (U+20ac, a.k.a. EURO SIGN)