Common Character Sets

Although there is general agreement on the content and arrangement of most character sets, especially those that are maintained by the ISO, many different names are used by vendors and software packages for similar or identical character sets. US-ASCII encodes the basic characters and symbols that are needed to write the English language. However, US-ASCII is limited to 127 characters and cannot represent many characters that are needed by Western European languages, such as French and German, let alone ideographic languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, in which each character represents a word or concept. Many character sets, however, include all US-ASCII characters in addition to their other characters.

The following table illustrates just a few common character sets that you are likely to encounter and some of the names that are used by different vendors to refer to them:

Character Set	Description and Comments	Type	PeopleSoft and SQR Name	Oracle DBMS Name	Microsoft Windows Name
ISO 8859-1	Western European Latin-1. Contains characters that are required to represent Western European languages. However, does not include the euro symbol, the trademark (TM) symbol, or the oe ligature.	ISO	LATIN1 or ISO_8859-1	WE8ISO8859P1	CP28591
Microsoft Code Page 1252	Microsoft Code Page 1252 - Western European. Very similar to ISO 8859-1, except for the inclusion of additional characters. Includes the euro symbol, trademark (TM) symbol, and oe ligature, but using a different codepoint than ISO 8859-15.	Vendor (Microsoft)	CP1252	WE8MSWIN1252	CP1252
ISO 8859-2	Central/Eastern European Latin-2. Contains characters that are required for Central European languages, including Czech, Hungarian, and Polish. Does not include the euro symbol.	ISO	LATIN2 or ISO_8859-2	EE8ISO8859P2	CP28592
ISO 8859-15	Western European extended Latin-9. Similar to ISO 8859-1, but contains the euro symbol, oe ligature, and several characters that are required for Icelandic.	ISO	LATIN9 or ISO_8859-15	WE8ISO8859P15	CP28605
Shift-JIS	Most common Japanese character set. Defines thousands of characters for writing Japanese.	Country (Japan)	SJIS	JA16SJIS or JA16SJISTILDE	CP932
IBM CCSID 37	IBM Coded Character Set ID 37. Western European Multilingual EBCDIC-based character set.	Vendor (IBM)	EBCDIC	WE8EBCDIC37	CP1140
GB18030	Chinese national character set	Country (China)	GB18030	GB18030	GB18030

Some of these character sets, such as ISO 8859-1 and IBM CCSID 37, require only one byte to represent each character. For example, in ISO 8859-1, the hexadecimal number 61 represents the lowercase Latin letter a. However, larger character sets, such as Shift-JIS, may require more than one byte to represent each character.