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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.
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 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. 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 (Š and Ž), typographic quotation marks and dashes, and common symbols such as the euro sign (€) 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. 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. Code values 00–1F, 7F, and 80–9F are not assigned to characters by ISO/IEC 8859-1. Related character maps The ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard has long been the basis of a number of character maps, also known as character sets, charsets, or code pages, the most popular being ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen) and Windows-1252. Both of these maps are a superset of ISO/IEC 8859-1; they supplement the standard's 191 character assignments by mapping additional characters to at least some portion of the code value ranges 00–1F, 7F, and 80–9F. ISO-8859-1 In 1992, the IANA registered the character map ISO_8859-1:1987, more commonly known by its preferred MIME name of ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen over ISO 8859-1), a superset of ISO 8859-1, for use on the Internet. This map assigns the C0 and C1 control characters to the code values 00–1F, 7F, and 80–9F. It thus provides for 256 characters via every possible 8-bit value. ISO-8859-1 is (according to the standards at least) the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP with a MIME type beginning with "text/". It is the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and is the standard encoding used by the X Window System on most Unix machines in locales which use that character set. It was also the basis of the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML 3.2 documents (HTML 4.0, however, is based on unicode). Escape sequences (from ISO/IEC 6429 or ISO/IEC 2022) are not to be interpreted in documents labeled as ISO-8859-1 encoded. As well as the canonical name and preferred MIME name mentioned above, the following other aliases are registered for ISO-8859-1: ISO_8859-1, ISO-8859-1, iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, CP819. ISO-8859-1 was also incorporated as the first 256 code points of Unicode. The ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 mixup It is very common to mislabel text data with the charset label ISO-8859-1, even though the data is really Windows-1252 encoded. In Windows-1252, codes between 0x80 and 0x9F are used for letters and punctuation, whereas they are control codes in ISO-8859-1. Many web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters in order to accommodate such mislabeling. Similar character sets The Apple Macintosh computer introduced a character encoding called Mac Roman, or Mac-Roman, in 1984. It was meant to be suitable for Western European desktop publishing. It is a superset of ASCII, like ISO-8859-1, and has most of the characters that are in ISO-8859-1 but in a totally different arrangement. A later version, registered with IANA as "Macintosh", replaced the generic currency sign ¤ with the euro sign €. The few printable characters that are in ISO 8859-1 but not in this set are often a source of trouble when editing text on websites using older Macintosh browsers (including the last version of Internet Explorer for Mac). DOS had code page 850, which had all printable characters that ISO-8859-1 had (albeit in a totally different arrangement) plus the most widely used graphics characters from code page 437. See also | ||||||||
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