ISO 8859

Behind the ISO standard ISO 8859 are many character set tables that use the 8-bit encoding range between 128 (80) and 255( FF). Under ISO 8859 several international character sets are defined as well as exotic ones. The individual character sets can be used to represent special national characters (ä, ö, ü, ß), European, international and special characters such as Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic.

In the ASCII character set, which forms the basis for ISO 8859, 7 bits are encoded. This corresponds to the 128 characters that occupy ASCII character set positions 0 to 127. Positions 128 to 255 are reserved with diacritical characters for national character sets and for special characters. ISO 8859 has about 15 different sub-standards and is constantly being expanded and updated.

ISO 8859-1:Latin-1, for Western Europe, America, Australia, parts of Africa.

ISO8859-2: Latin-2, for Eastern Europe.

ISO8859-3: Latin-3, for Galicia, Turkey and Spain.

ISO8859-4: Latin-4, for the Baltic States.

ISO8859-5: for Cyrillic

ISO8859-6: for Arabic.

ISO8859-7: for Greek.

ISO8859-8: for Hebrew.

ISO8859-9: Latin-5, with Turkish components

ISO 8859-13: English, Estonian, Finnish, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian.

The ISO 8859 character encoding is used in web applications and in e-mails. The character set was developed by the European Computer Manufacturers Association( ECMA) back in 1994.