ISO885915

ISO/IEC 8859-15, commonly referred to as Latin-9, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of 8-bit single-byte character encodings. It covers Western European languages and is designed as an updated revision of ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) to better align with modern European usage. The encoding preserves the ASCII subset for code points 0x00 to 0x7F.

Released to accommodate the euro and other Western European needs, ISO-8859-15 replaces a few less-used Latin-1 symbols with the euro sign and related typographic characters. The euro symbol is included, occupying the code position 0xA4, and the remaining extended range (0xA0 to 0xFF) contains letters with diacritics and punctuation common to Western European languages.

Technically, ISO-8859-15 defines 256 code points, with 0x00–0x1F and 0x7F–0x9F reserved for C0/C1 control codes, and 0x20–0x7F representing ASCII. The standardized mapping provides direct equivalents to Unicode code points, enabling text interchange with other encodings and Unicode-based systems.

Usage and legacy status: ISO-8859-15 saw adoption in various Western European environments prior to the widespread adoption of Unicode. Today, Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 have largely supplant ISO-8859-15 for new software, web pages, and data interchange. However, it remains relevant for legacy systems and certain regional configurations. Some software and web servers may misinterpret it as Windows-1252 if the encoding is not correctly declared, leading to character display issues such as incorrect euro rendering.

See also: ISO/IEC 8859 family, Latin-1, Windows-1252, Unicode, UTF-8.