ISO8859-1

ISO8859-1 encoding is a single-byte encoding that is based on and is compatible with other ISO, American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and European Computer Manufacturer's Association (ECMA) code extension techniques. The ISO8859 encoding defines a family of code sets with each member containing its own unique character sets. The 7-bit ASCII code set is a proper subset of each of the code sets in the ISO8859 family.

The ISO8859-1 code set is called the ISO Latin-1 code set and consists of two character sets:

• ISO646-IRV Graphic Left, 7-bit ASCII character set

• ISO8859-1 Graphic Right (Latin) character set

These character sets combined include the characters necessary for Western European languages such as Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

While the ASCII code set defines an order for the English alphabet, the Graphic Right (GR) characters are not ordered according to any specific language. The language-specific ordering is defined by the locale.