ISO/IEC 8859-1

ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998

MIME	ISO-8859-1
Alias(es)	iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, CP819
Standard	ISO/IEC 8859

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 (see below for HTML5 exception). 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. Code page 28591 a.k.a. Windows-28591 is the actual ISO-8859-1 codepage.^[1]

Coverage

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. In May 2016, 6.4% of all web sites use ISO 8859-1,^[2][3] that by HTML5 standards should be the same encoding as Windows-1252, and given that it's the case, then its 0.9% share ^[2] can be added to it giving 7.3% of web sites effectively using "ISO 8859-1" in the form of Windows-1252.

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):

Modern languages with complete coverage

Afrikaans Albanian Basque Breton Corsican Danish[lower-alpha 1] English[lower-alpha 2]

Faroese Galician German Icelandic Irish Indonesian Italian

Kurdish[lower-alpha 3] Leonese Luxembourgish[lower-alpha 4] Malay[lower-alpha 5] Manx Norwegian[lower-alpha 6] Occitan

Portuguese[lower-alpha 7] Rhaeto-Romanic Scottish Gaelic Spanish Swahili Swedish Walloon

Notes

1. Complete support except for Ǿ/ǿ which are missing. Ǿ/ǿ can be replaced with Ø/ø or øe at the cost of increased ambiguity.
2. US and modern British.
3. Kurdish Unified Alphabet, based on the Latin character set.
4. Basic classical orthography.
5. Rumi script.
6. Bokmål and Nynorsk.
7. European and Brazilian.

Languages commonly supported but with incomplete coverage

Language	Missing characters	Typical workaround	Supported by
Catalan	Ŀ, ŀ (deprecated)	L·, l·
Dutch	IJ, ij	digraphs IJ, ij
Estonian	Š, š, Ž, ž (only present in loanwords)	Sh, sh, Zh, zh	ISO-8859-15, Windows-1252
Finnish	Š, š, Ž, ž (only present in loanwords)	Sh, sh, Zh, zh	ISO-8859-15, Windows-1252
French	Œ, œ, and the very rare Ÿ	digraphs OE, oe, and Y without the diaeresis (or Ý)	ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, Windows-1252
Guarani	Ẽ, ẽ, Ĩ, ĩ, Ũ, ũ, Ỹ, ỹ, G̃, g̃	E~, e~, I~, i~, U~, u~, Y~, y~, G~, g~ or Ê, ê, Î, î, Û, û, Ý, ÿ
Hungarian	Ő, ő, Ű, ű	Õ, õ (or Ô, ô; sometimes Ö, ö), Û, û (sometimes Ü, ü)	ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250
Irish (traditional orthography)	Ḃ, ḃ, Ċ, ċ, Ḋ, ḋ, Ḟ, ḟ, Ġ, ġ, Ṁ, ṁ, Ṡ, ṡ, Ṫ, ṫ	Bh, bh, Ch, ch, Dh, dh, Fh, fh, Gh, gh, Mh, mh, Sh, sh, Th, th	ISO-8859-14
Latin with macrons	Ā, ā, Ē, ē, Ī, ī, Ō, ō, Ū, ū		ISO-8859-13, Windows-1257
Māori	Ā, ā, Ē, ē, Ī, ī, Ō, ō, Ū, ū	Ä, ä, Ë, ë, Ï, ï, Ö, ö, Ü, ü	ISO-8859-13, Windows-1257
Romanian	Ă, ă, Ș, ș, Ț, ț and older Ţ, ţ with cedilla	A, a (or Ã, ã), S, s, T, t	ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 (Ţ, ţ with cedilla)
Turkish	İ, ı, Ğ, ğ, Ş, ş	I, ï, G, g, S, s	ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-9, Windows-1254
Welsh	Ẁ, ẁ, Ẃ, ẃ, Ŵ, ŵ, Ŷ, ŷ	Ý, ÿ	ISO-8859-14

Quotation marks

For some languages listed above, the correct typographical quotation marks are missing, as only « », " ", and ' ' are included. Also, this scheme does not provide for oriented (6- or 9-shaped) single or double quotation marks. Some fonts will display the spacing grave accent (0x60) and the apostrophe (0x27) as a matching pair of oriented single quotation marks, but this is not considered part of the modern standard.

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 in March 1985 as ECMA-94, by which name it is still sometimes known. The second edition of ECMA-94 (June 1986) also included ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, and ISO 8859-4 as part of the specification.

In 1985, Commodore adopted ISO 8859-1 for its new AmigaOS operating system. The Seikosha MP-1300AI impact dot-matrix printer, used with the Amiga 1000, included this encoding.

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 unassigned code values 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/" (however the HTML5 specification requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding.^[4]) It is the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and defines the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML 3.2 documents (HTML 4.0, however, is based on Unicode). It and Windows-1252 are often assumed to be the encoding of text on Unix and Microsoft Windows in the absence of locale or other information, this is only gradually being replaced with Unicode encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Codepage layout

Legend:

Alphabetic   Control character   Numeric digit   Punctuation

Extended punctuation   Graphic character   International   Undefined

ISO/IEC 8859-1

ISO/IEC 8859-1

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
0_
1_
2_	SP 0020 32	! 0021 33	" 0022 34	# 0023 35	$ 0024 36	% 0025 37	& 0026 38	' 0027 39	( 0028 40	) 0029 41	* 002A 42	+ 002B 43	, 002C 44	- 002D 45	. 002E 46	/ 002F 47
3_	0 0030 48	1 0031 49	2 0032 50	3 0033 51	4 0034 52	5 0035 53	6 0036 54	7 0037 55	8 0038 56	9 0039 57	: 003A 58	; 003B 59	< 003C 60	= 003D 61	> 003E 62	? 003F 63
4_	@ 0040 64	A 0041 65	B 0042 66	C 0043 67	D 0044 68	E 0045 69	F 0046 70	G 0047 71	H 0048 72	I 0049 73	J 004A 74	K 004B 75	L 004C 76	M 004D 77	N 004E 78	O 004F 79
5_	P 0050 80	Q 0051 81	R 0052 82	S 0053 83	T 0054 84	U 0055 85	V 0056 86	W 0057 87	X 0058 88	Y 0059 89	Z 005A 90	[ 005B 91	\ 005C 92	] 005D 93	^ 005E 94	_ 005F 95
6_	` 0060 96	a 0061 97	b 0062 98	c 0063 99	d 0064 100	e 0065 101	f 0066 102	g 0067 103	h 0068 104	i 0069 105	j 006A 106	k 006B 107	l 006C 108	m 006D 109	n 006E 110	o 006F 111
7_	p 0070 112	q 0071 113	r 0072 114	s 0073 115	t 0074 116	u 0075 117	v 0076 118	w 0077 119	x 0078 120	y 0079 121	z 007A 122	{ 007B 123	| 007C 124	} 007D 125	~ 007E 126
8_
9_
A_	NBSP 00A0 160	¡ 00A1 161	¢ 00A2 162	£ 00A3 163	¤ 00A4 164	¥ 00A5 165	¦ 00A6 166	§ 00A7 167	¨ 00A8 168	© 00A9 169	ª 00AA 170	« 00AB 171	¬ 00AC 172	SHY 00AD 173	® 00AE 174	¯ 00AF 175
B_	° 00B0 176	± 00B1 177	² 00B2 178	³ 00B3 179	´ 00B4 180	µ 00B5 181	¶ 00B6 182	· 00B7 183	¸ 00B8 184	¹ 00B9 185	º 00BA 186	» 00BB 187	¼ 00BC 188	½ 00BD 189	¾ 00BE 190	¿ 00BF 191
C_	À 00C0 192	Á 00C1 193	Â 00C2 194	Ã 00C3 195	Ä 00C4 196	Å 00C5 197	Æ 00C6 198	Ç 00C7 199	È 00C8 200	É 00C9 201	Ê 00CA 202	Ë 00CB 203	Ì 00CC 204	Í 00CD 205	Î 00CE 206	Ï 00CF 207
D_	Ð 00D0 208	Ñ 00D1 209	Ò 00D2 210	Ó 00D3 211	Ô 00D4 212	Õ 00D5 213	Ö 00D6 214	× 00D7 215	Ø 00D8 216	Ù 00D9 217	Ú 00DA 218	Û 00DB 219	Ü 00DC 220	Ý 00DD 221	Þ 00DE 222	ß 00DF 223
E_	à 00E0 224	á 00E1 225	â 00E2 226	ã 00E3 227	ä 00E4 228	å 00E5 229	æ 00E6 230	ç 00E7 231	è 00E8 232	é 00E9 233	ê 00EA 234	ë 00EB 235	ì 00EC 236	í 00ED 237	î 00EE 238	ï 00EF 239
F_	ð 00F0 240	ñ 00F1 241	ò 00F2 242	ó 00F3 243	ô 00F4 244	õ 00F5 245	ö 00F6 246	÷ 00F7 247	ø 00F8 248	ù 00F9 249	ú 00FA 250	û 00FB 251	ü 00FC 252	ý 00FD 253	þ 00FE 254	ÿ 00FF 255
	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F

Similar character sets

ISO-8859-1 was incorporated as the first 256 code points of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode.

The lower range 32 to 126 (hex 20 to 7E, the G0 subset) maps exactly to the same coded G0 subset of the ISO 646 US variant (commonly known as ASCII), whose ISO 2022 standard switch sequence is "ESC ( B". The higher range 160 to 255 (hex A0 to FF, the G1 subset) maps exactly to the same subset initiated by the ISO 2022 standard switch sequence "ESC . A".

ISO/IEC 8859-1 is missing some characters for French and Finnish text and the euro sign. 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.

The popular Windows-1252 character set adds all the missing characters provided by ISO/IEC 8859-15, plus a number of typographic symbols, by replacing the rarely used C1 controls in the range 128 to 159 (hex 80 to 9F). It is very common to mislabel text data with the charset label ISO-8859-1, even though the data is really Windows-1252 encoded. Many web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters, and that behavior was later standardized in HTML5, in order to accommodate such mislabeling and care should be taken to avoid generating these characters in ISO-8859-1 labeled content.

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). However the extra characters that Windows-1252 has in the C1 codepoint range are all supported in MacRoman.

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 graphic characters from code page 437.

See also

• Latin script in Unicode
• Unicode
• Universal Character Set
• UTF-8
• Windows code pages
• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2

References

1. "Code Page Identifiers". Microsoft Corporation. Retrieved 2010-12-19.
2. http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/character_encoding
3. http://w3techs.com/faq
4. HTML 5 Draft Recommendation — 12 April 2010, 8.1 Character encodings, retrieved [2010-04-12].

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998
• ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1 (draft dated February 12, 1998, published April 15, 1998)
• Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
• ISO-IR 100 Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet No.1 (February 1, 1986)
• Windows Code pages
• Differences between ANSI, ISO-8859-1 and MacRoman Character Sets
• The Letter Database
• The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup - Roman Czyborra's summary of ISO character sets