What's the difference between code page and character encoding? [duplicate]

Question

My ASP.NET application imports CSV files. They are mostly saved in spreadsheet or notepad that asks for 'character set', for example: ISO-8859-2, Windows-1210, DOS-852 or Unicode(UTF-8).

Wiki says UTF-8 is a character encoding but Windows-1210 and ISO-8859-2 are code pages. Are these terms interchangeable?

.NET reads files saved in UTF-8 fine. Does it discover encoding itself?

Answer 1

You might want to check out Joel Spolsky's article and this post here

Answer 2

Quotes from wiki:

"Code page is another name for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page

and:

"Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages (known as character encodings in other operating systems) used in Microsoft Windows systems from the 1980s and 1990s."