8859sarja

8859sarja refers to a series of ISO/IEC 8859 character encodings. These are legacy 8-bit character encodings that were widely used before the adoption of Unicode. Each 8859 encoding can represent 256 distinct characters. The number following "8859" in the designation indicates the specific set of characters covered by that encoding.

Notable examples include ISO/IEC 8859-1, also known as Latin-1, which is common for Western European languages. ISO/IEC 8859-2, or Latin-2, is used for Central European languages, while ISO/IEC 8859-5 covers Cyrillic alphabets. Other variants exist for various language groups, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Vietnamese. These encodings assign specific code points to letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters.

While historically significant, the limitations of 8-bit encodings, such as their inability to represent characters from multiple languages simultaneously, led to their gradual replacement by Unicode standards like UTF-8. UTF-8 can represent virtually all characters used in modern computing and is the de facto standard for web content and many operating systems. However, 8859 encodings may still be encountered in older systems, legacy data, or specific niche applications.