Shapefiles: Specification of character encoding

CPG files are part of the multi-file shapefile (sic!) format identifying the encoding used by the DBF. The issue with this file is that it is incredibly hard to find any document on how the encoding is actually identified.At the very best you find that it contains a single string and that you use UTF-8 to identify utf-8 encoded Unicode. That doesn't help a lot if you use codepage 1252. It took my quite some effort to find a blog entry that has a translation of what originally was found on a Belarus website (which seems to have crossed the river Styx).

Encoding ID	Encoding name	Additional ID	Other names
1252	Western	iso-8859-1 (*)	iso8859-1, iso_8859-1, iso-8859-1, ANSI_X3.4-1968, iso-ir-6, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ISO_646, irv:1991, ISO646-US, us, IBM367, cp367, csASCII, latin1, iso_8859-1:1987, iso-ir-100, ibm819, cp819, Windows-1252
20105	ASCII	us-ascii	us-acii, ascii
28592	Central European (ISO)	iso-8859-2	iso8859-2, iso-8859-2, iso_8859-2, latin2, iso_8859-2:1987, iso-ir-101, l2, csISOLatin2
1250	Central European (Windows)	Windows-1250	Windows-1250, x-cp1250
1251	Cyrillic (Windows)	Windows-1251	Windows-1251, x-cp1251
1253	Greek (Windows)	Windows-1253	Windows-1253
1254	Turkish (Windows)	Windows-1254	Windows-1254
932	Japanese (Shift-JIS)	shift_jis	shift_jis, x-sjis, ms_Kanji, csShiftJIS, x-ms-cp932
51932	Japanese (EUC)	x-euc-jp	Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese, csEUCPkdFmtJapanese, x-euc-jp, x-euc
50220	Japanese (JIS)	iso-2022-jp	csISO2022JP, iso-2022-jp
1257	Baltic (Windows)	Windows-1257	windows-1257
950	Traditional Chinese (BIG5)	big5	big5, csbig5, x-x-big5
936	Simplified Chinese (GB2312)	gb2312	GB_2312-80, iso-ir-58, chinese, csISO58GB231280, csGB2312, gb2312
20866	Cyrillic (KOI8-R)	koi8-r	csKOI8R, koi8-r
949	Korean (KSC5601)	ks_c_5601	ks_c_5601, ks_c_5601-1987, korean, csKSC56011987
1255 (logical)	Hebrew (ISO-logical)	Windows-1255	iso-8859-8i
1255 (visual)	Hebrew (ISO-Visual)	iso-8859-8	ISO-8859-8 Visual, ISO-8859-8 , ISO_8859-8, visual
862	Hebrew (DOS)	dos-862	dos-862
1256	Arabic (Windows)	Windows-1256	Windows-1256
720	Arabic (DOS)	dos-720	dos-720
874	Thai	Windows-874	Windows-874
1258	Vietnamese	Windows-1258	Windows-1258
65001	Unicode UTF-8	UTF-8 UTF-8,	unicode-1-1-utf-8, unicode-2-0-utf-8
65000	Unicode UTF-7	UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7	utf-7, UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7, csUnicode11UTF7, utf-7
50225	Korean (ISO)	ISO-2022-KR	ISO-2022-KR, csISO2022KR
52936	Simplified Chinese (HZ)	HZ-GB-2312	HZ-GB-2312
28594	Baltic (ISO)	iso-8869-4	ISO_8859-4:1988, iso-ir-110, ISO_8859-4, ISO-8859-4, latin4, l4, csISOLatin4
28585	Cyrillic (ISO)	iso_8859-5	ISO_8859-5:1988, iso-ir-144, ISO_8859-5, ISO-8859-5, cyrillic, csISOLatinCyrillic, csISOLatin5
28597	Greek (ISO)	iso-8859-7	ISO_8859-7:1987, iso-ir-126, ISO_8859-7, ISO-8859-7, ELOT_928, ECMA-118, greek, greek8, csISOLatinGreek
28599	Turkish (ISO)	iso-8859-9	ISO_8859-9:1989, iso-ir-148, ISO_8859-9, ISO-8859-9, latin5, l5, csISOLatin5

(*) except when 128-159 is used, use Windows-1252