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Historical charsets and encodings

Between 1950 and 2000, each manufacturer and each operating system created its own 8 bits encoding. The problem was that 8 bits (256 code points) are not enough to store any character, and so the encoding tries to fit the user's language. Most 8 bits encodings are able to encode multiple languages, usually geographically close (e.g. ISO-8859-1 is intented for Western Europe).

NELLE : "the problem was" & "The problem is" est plus une expression francaise traduite: ce n'est pas faux grammaticallement en anglais, mais ne sonne pas juste:

8 bits (256 code points) are not enought so store all (Unicode?) characters

It was difficult to exchange documents with different languages, because using an invalid encoding while loading the document leads to mojibake <mojibake>.

NELLE : un exemple serait le bienvenu

ASCII

ASCII

ASCII encoding is supported by all applications. A document encoded in ASCII can be read decoded by any other encoding. This is explained by the fact that all 7 and 8 bits encodings are superset of ASCII, to be compatible with ASCII. Except JIS X 0201 <jis> encoding: 0x5C is decoded to the yen sign (U+00A5, ¥) instead of a backslash (U+005C, \).

ASCII is the smallest encoding, it only contains 128 codes including 95 printable characters (letters, digits, punctuation signs and some other various characters) and 33 control codes. Control codes are used to control the terminal. For example, the "line feed" (code point 10, usually written "\n") marks the end of a line. There are some special control code. For example, the "bell" (code point 7, written "\b") sent to ring a bell.

-0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -a -b -c -d -e -f
0- NUL

�

�

�

�

�

�

 BEL

�

 TAB

LF

�

�

CR

�

�
1-

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

 ESC

�

�

�

�
2-

!

"

#

$

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/
3-

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?
4-

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O
5-

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

 \

]

^

_
6- `

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o
7-

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

 |

}

~

 DEL

0x00—0x1F and 0x7F are control codes:

  • NUL (0x00): nul character (U+0000, "\0")
  • BEL (0x07): sent to ring a bell (U+0007, "\b")
  • TAB (0x09): horizontal tabulation (U+0009, "\t")
  • LF (0x0A): line feed (U+000A, "\n")
  • CR (0x0D): carriage return (U+000D, "\r")
  • ESC (0x1B): escape (U+001B)
  • DEL (0x7F): delete (U+007F)
  • other control codes are displayed as � in this table

0x20 is a space.

Note

The first 128 code points of the Unicode charset (U+0000—U+007F) are the ASCII charset: Unicode is a superset of ASCII.

ISO 8859 family

Year Norm Description Variant
1987 ISO 8859-1 Western European: German, French, Italian, … cp1252
1987 ISO 8859-2 Central European: Croatian, Polish, Czech, … cp1250

1988 1988

ISO 8859-3 ISO 8859-4

South European: Turkish and Esperanto North European -
1988 ISO 8859-5 Latin/Cyrillic: Macedonian, Russian, … KOI family
1987 ISO 8859-6 Latin/Arabic: Arabic language characters cp1256
1987 ISO 8859-7 Latin/Greek: modern Greek language cp1253
1988 ISO 8859-8 Latin/Hebrew: modern Hebrew alphabet cp1255
1989 ISO 8859-9 Turkish: Largely the same as ISO 8859-1 cp1254
1992 ISO 8859-10 Nordic: a rearrangement of Latin-4 -
2001 ISO 8859-11 Latin/Thai: Thai language TIS 620, cp874
1998 ISO 8859-13 Baltic Rim: Baltic languages cp1257
1998 ISO 8859-14 Celtic: Gaelic, Breton -
1999 ISO 8859-15 Revision of 8859-1: euro sign cp1252
2001 ISO 8859-16 South-Eastern European -

Note

ISO 8859-12 doesn't exist.

Arabic (cp1256, ISO-8859-6)

ISO-8859-1

ISO 8859-1

ISO/CEI 8859-1, also known as "Latin-1" or "ISO-8859-1", is a superset of ASCII: it adds 128 code points, mostly latin letters with diacritics and 32 control codes. It is used in the USA and in Western Europe.

-0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -a -b -c -d -e -f
0- NUL

�

�

�

�

�

�

 BEL

�

 TAB

LF

�

�

CR

�

�
1-

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

 ESC

�

�

�

�
2-

!

"

#

$

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/
3-

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?
4-

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O
5-

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

\

]

^

_
6-

`

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o
7-

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

}

~

 DEL
8-

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�
9-

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�
a- NBSP

¡

¢

£

¤

¥

¦

§

¨

©

ª

«

¬

 SHY

®

¯
b-

°

±

²

³

´

µ

·

¸

¹

º

»

¼

½

¾

¿
c-

À

Á

Â

Ã

Ä

Å

Æ

Ç

È

É

Ê

Ë

Ì

Í

Î

Ï
d-

Ð

Ñ

Ò

Ó

Ô

Õ

Ö

×

Ø

Ù

Ú

Û

Ü

Ý

Þ

ß
e-

à

á

â

ã

ä

å

æ

ç

è

é

ê

ë

ì

í

î

ï
f-

ð

ñ

ò

ó

ô

õ

ö

÷

ø

ù

ú

û

ü

ý

þ

ÿ

U+0000—U+001F, U+007F and U+0080—U+009F are control codes (displayed as � in this table). See the ASCII table for U+0000—U+001F and U+007F control codes.

"NBSP" (U+00A0) is a non breaking space and "SHY" (U+00AD) is a soft hyphen.

Note

The 256 first code points of the Unicode charset (U+0000—U+00FF) are the ISO-8859-1 charset: Unicode is a superset of ISO-8859-1.

cp1252

cp1252

Windows code page <codepage> 1252, best known as cp1252, is a variant of ISO-8859-1. It is the default encoding of all English and Western Europe Windows setups. It is used as a fallback by web browsers if the webpage doesn't provide any encoding information (not in HTML, nor in HTTP).

cp1252 shares 224 code points with ISO-8859-1, the range 0x80—0x9F (32 characters, including 5 not assigned codes) are different. In ISO-8859-1, this range are 32 control codes (not printable).

Code point ISO-8859-1 cp1252 Code point ISO-8859-1 cp1252

0x80

U+0080

 € (U+20AC)

0x90

U+0090

 not assigned

0x81

U+0081

 not assigned

0x91

U+0091

 ‘ (U+2018)

0x82

U+0082

 ‚ (U+201A)

0x92

U+0092

 ’ (U+2019)

0x83

U+0083

 ƒ (U+0192)

0x93

U+0093

 “ (U+201C)

0x84

U+0084

 „ (U+201E)

0x94

U+0094

 ” (U+201D)

0x85

U+0085

 … (U+2026)

0x95

U+0095

 • (U+2022)

0x86

U+0086

 † (U+2020)

0x96

U+0096

 – (U+2013)

0x87

U+0087

 ‡ (U+2021)

0x97

U+0097

 — (U+2014)

0x88

U+0088

 ˆ (U+02C6)

0x98

U+0098

 ˜ (U+02DC)

0x89

U+0089

 ‰ (U+2030)

0x99

U+0099

 ™ (U+2122)

0x8A

U+008A

 Š (U+0160)

0x9A

U+009A

 š (U+0161)

0x8B

U+008B

 ‹ (U+2039)

0x9B

U+009B

 › (U+203A)

0x8C

U+008C

 Π(U+0152)

0x9C

U+009C

 œ (U+0153)

0x8D

U+008D

 not assigned

0x9D

U+009D

 not assigned

0x8E

U+008E

 Ž (U+017D)

0x9E

U+009E

 ž (U+017U)

0x8F

U+008F

 not assigned

0x9F

U+009F

 Ÿ (U+0178)

ISO-8859-15

ISO 8859-15

ISO/CEI 8859-15, also known as Latin-9 or ISO-8859-15, is a variant of ISO-8859-1. 248 code points are identicals, 8 are different:

Code point ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-15 Code point ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-15
0xA4 ¤ (U+00A4) € (U+20AC) 0xB8 ¸ (U+00B8) ž (U+017E)
0xA6 ¦ (U+00A6) Š (U+0160) 0xBC ¼ (U+00BC) Œ (U+0152)
0xA8 ¨ (U+00A8) š (U+0161) 0xBD ½ (U+00BD) œ (U+0152)
0xB4 ´ (U+00B4) Ž (U+017D) 0xBE ¾ (U+00BE) Ÿ (U+0178)

CJK: asian encodings

GBK

Chinese encodings

GBK is a family of Chinese charsets using multibyte encodings:

  • GB 2312 (1980): includes 6,763 Chinese characters
  • GBK (1993) (code page <codepage> 936)
  • GB 18030 (2005, last revision in 2006)
  • HZ (1989) (HG-GZ-2312)

Other encodings: Big5 (大五碼, Big Five Encoding, 1984), cp950.

JIS

Japanese encodings

JIS is a family of Japanese encodings:

  • JIS X 0201 (1969): all code points are encoded to 1 byte
  • 16 bits:
    • JIS X 0208 (first version in 1978: "JIS C 6226", last revision in 1997): code points are encoded to 1 or 2 bytes
    • JIS X 0212 (1990), extends JIS X 0208 charset: it is only a charset. Use EUC-JP or ISO 2022 to encode it.
    • JIS X 0213 (first version in 2000, last revision in 2004: EUC JIS X 2004), EUC JIS X 0213: it is only a charset, use EUC-JP, ISO 2022 or ShiftJIS 2004 to encode it.
  • JIS X 0211 (1994), based on ISO/IEC 6429

Microsoft encodings:

  • Shift JIS
  • Windows code page <codepage> 932 (cp932): extension of Shift JIS

In strict mode (flags=MB_ERR_INVALID_CHARS), cp932 cannot decode bytes in 0x81—0xA0 and 0xE0—0xFF ranges. By default (flags=0), 0x81—0x9F and 0xE0—0xFC are decoded as U+30FB (Katakana middle dot), 0xA0 as U+F8F0, 0xFD as U+F8F1, 0xFE as U+F8F2 and 0xFF as U+F8F3 (U+E000—U+F8FF is for private usage).

which JIS encodings use multibyte?

The JIS family causes mojibake <mojibake> on MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows because the yen sign (U+00A5, ¥) is encoded to 0x5C which is a backslash (U+005C, \) in ASCII. For example, "C:\Windows\win.ini" is displayed "C:¥Windows¥win.ini". The backslash is encoded to 0x81 0x5F.

To encode Japanese, there is also the ISO/IEC 2022 encoding family.

ISO 2022

ISO/IEC 2022 is an encoding family:

  • ISO-2022-JP: JIS X 0201-1976, JIS X 0208-1978, JIS X 0208-1983
  • ISO-2022-JP-1: JIS X 0212-1990
  • ISO-2022-JP-2: GB 2312-1980, KS X 1001-1992, ISO/IEC 8859-1 <ISO-8859-1>, ISO/IEC 8859-7
  • ISO-2022-JP-3: JIS X 0201-1976, JIS X 0213-2000, JIS X 0213-2000
  • ISO-2022-JP-2004: JIS X 0213-2004
  • ISO-2022-KR: KS X 1001-1992
  • ISO-2022-CN: GB 2312-1980, CNS 11643-1992 (planes 1 and 2)
  • ISO-2022-CN-EXT: ISO-IR-165, CNS 11643-1992 (planes 3 though 7)

Extended Unix Code (EUC)

  • EUC-CN: GB2312
  • EUC-JP: JIS X 0208, JIS X 0212, JIS X 0201
  • EUC-KR: KS X 1001, KS X 1003
  • EUC-TW: CNS 11643 (16 planes)

Cyrillic

KOI family, "Код Обмена Информацией":

  • KOI-7: oldest KOI encoding (ASCII + some characters)
  • KOI8-R: Russian
  • KOI8-U: Ukrainian

Variants: ECMA-Cyrillic, KOI8-Unified, cp1251, MacUkrainian, Bulgarian MIK, ...