ISO/IEC 8859-2

ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as "Latin-2". It is generally intended for Central^[1] or "Eastern European" languages that are written in the Latin script. Note that ISO/IEC 8859-2 is very different from code page 852 (MS-DOS Latin 2, PC Latin 2) which is also referred to as "Latin-2" in Czech and Slovak regions.^[2]

ISO-8859-2 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. 0.2% of all web pages use ISO 8859-2 in June 2016.^[3] Microsoft has assigned code page 28592 a.k.a. Windows-28592 to ISO-8859-2 in Windows. IBM assigned Code page 1111 to ISO 8859-2.

Codepage 1250 a.k.a. Windows-1250 has many of the same characters but in a different arrangement.

These code values can be used for the following languages:

• Albanian
• Bosnian
• Croatian
• Czech
• German (fully compatible with ISO/IEC 8859-1 for German texts)
• Hungarian
• Polish
• Romanian (note the comments below)
• Serbian Latin
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Upper Sorbian
• Lower Sorbian
• Turkmen.

It can also be used for Romanian, but it is unsuitable for that language, because of lack of letters s and t with commas below, containing s and t with cedillas instead. These letters were unified in the first versions of the Unicode standard, meaning that the appearance with cedilla or with comma was treated as a glyph choice rather than as separate characters; fonts intended for use with Romanian should, therefore, have characters with comma below at those code points. Microsoft did not really provide such fonts for computers sold in Romania. Still, ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250 (with the same problem) have been heavily used for Romanian. Unicode (which supports both variants) has taken the lead for web pages, which however often have s and t with cedilla anyway. Unicode notes as of 2014 that encoding the letters with comma below was a mistake, causing corruptions of Romanian data.

Code page layout

In the following table characters are shown together with their corresponding Unicode code points. Note that code values 00-1F, 7F, and 80-9F are not assigned to characters by ISO/IEC 8859-2. Code 20 is the regular SPACE character, and A0 is the NON-BREAKING SPACE. Code AD is a SOFT HYPHEN, which even in isolation may not appear at all in compliant web browsers.

Legend:

See also

• Character encoding
• Polish code pages

References

External links

• ISO 8859-2:1999
• Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
• ISO-IR 101 Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet No.2 (February 1, 1986)
• ISO 8859-2 (Latin 2) Resources