Computer memory saves all data in digital form. There is no way to store characters directly. Each character has its digital code equivalent: ASCII code (for American Standard Code for Information ...

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. more commonly known as ASCII, is the standard for representing all upper-case and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuations, etc as a code ...

The sequential order of ASCII data. In ASCII code, lower case characters follow upper case. True ASCII order would put the words DATA, data and SYSTEM into the following sequence. See ASCII chart.

It appears that the particular variety of extended ASCII that I want is actually called Code Page 437 as opposed to the more popular ISO 8859-1. The reason I wasn't seeing the right characters in OS X ...