ISO/IEC 8859-1

ISO/IEC 8859-1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ISO/IEC 8859-1

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For the character encoding commonly mislabeled as "ISO-8859-1", see Windows-1252.

ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is generally intended for “Western European” languages (see below for a list). It is the basis for most popular 8-bit character sets, including Windows-1252 and the first block of characters in Unicode.

ISO-8859-1 is the IANA preferred name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The following other aliases are registered for ISO-8859-1: iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, CP819.

The Windows-1252 codepage coincides with ISO-8859-1 for all codes except the range 128 to 159 (hex 80 to 9F), where the little-used C1 controls are replaced with additional characters including all the missing characters provided by ISO-8859-15. Windows-28591 is the actual ISO-8859-1 codepage.^[1]

[edit] Coverage

See also: Alphabets derived from the Latin

ISO 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 1," consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script. This character-encoding scheme is used throughout The Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following European languages (with a few exceptions due to missing characters, as noted):