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ISO/IEC 8859-1

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ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding of the Latin alphabet. It was originally developed by the ISO, but later jointly maintained by the ISO and the IEC. The standard, when supplemented with additional character assignments, is the basis of two widely-used character maps known as ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen) and Windows-1252.

In June 2004, the ISO/IEC working group responsible for maintaining eight-bit coded character sets disbanded and ceased all maintenance of ISO 8859, including ISO 8859-1, in order to concentrate on the Universal Character Set and Unicode. In computing applications, encodings that provide full UCS support (such as UTF-8 and UTF-16) are finding increasing favor over encodings based on ISO 8859-1.

Contents

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Coverage

ISO 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 1," consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script. 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):

Other languages covered include

Thus, this character encoding is used throughout The Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. For some languages the correct typographical quotation marks are missing, for only « and » are included.

See also: Alphabets derived from the Latin

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History

ISO 8859-1 was based on the Multinational Character Set used by Digital Equipment Corporation in the popular VT220 terminal. It was developed within ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association, and published along with ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, and ISO 8859-4 as part of the specification ECMA-94, by which name it is still sometimes known.

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Relationship to ISO/IEC 8859-15

Although ISO/IEC 8859-1 has enough characters for most French text, it is missing a few less-common letters. It is also missing a single-glyph representation for the letter IJ, two Finnish letters used for transcription of some foreign names and in a few loanwords, typographic quotation marks and dashes, and common symbols such as the euro symbol (€) and dagger (†).

In order to provide some of these characters, ISO/IEC 8859-15 was developed as an update of ISO/IEC 8859-1. This required, however, the removal of some infrequently-used characters from ISO/IEC 8859-1, including fraction symbols and letter-free diacritics: ¤, ¦, ¨, ´, ¸, ¼, ½, and ¾.

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Code table

Since all 191 characters encoded by ISO/IEC 8859-1 are 'graphic' (ISO's term for characters that are not control codes) and are compatible with most web browsers, they can be shown as glyphs in the following table. Since the space, no-break space, and soft hyphen characters would not normally be visible, they are represented by abbreviations for their names. All other characters are represented literally. Row and column headings indicate the hexadecimal digit combinations to produce the eight-bit code value; e.g., the letter L is at code value 4C.

ISO/IEC 8859-1
x0 x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 x8 x9 xA xB xC xD xE xF
0x unused
1x
2x SP ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
3x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
4x @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
5x P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
6x ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
7x p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~
8x unused
9x
Ax NBSP ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬ SHY ® ¯
Bx ° ± ² ³ ´ µ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿
Cx À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
Dx Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
Ex à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
Fx ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

Code values 00–1F, 7F, and 80–9F are not assigned to characters by ISO/IEC 8859-1.

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