ISO885916

ISO/IEC 8859-16, commonly referred to as Latin-10 and sometimes written ISO8859-16, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of single-byte encodings. It was published in 1998 by ISO/IEC and provides Latin-script characters for several Southeastern European languages that were not fully represented in earlier parts of the standard.

Character set and structure: Like other ISO-8859 encodings, the code points 0x00–0x7F are identical to ASCII. The upper half (0xA0–0xFF) contains letters with diacritics and other characters needed for regional orthographies. The exact mapping differs from ISO-8859-1 and other Latin encodings, reflecting the needs of languages in the region such as Albanian, Croatian, Romanian, and Slovene, among others. The encoding is designed as a single-byte, 8-bit system with no multibyte sequences.

Usage and current status: ISO-8859-16 did not achieve the broad adoption of some other members of the ISO-8859 family. With the global shift to Unicode, its use has declined, and it is largely encountered as a legacy encoding in older software, documents, or databases. When exchanging data with modern systems, conversion to Unicode (such as UTF-8 or UTF-16) is typically performed.

Relation to other standards: The encoding is part of the ISO-8859 family and is distinct from Windows-1250 or other Windows code pages. Implementations rely on conversion mappings to Unicode to enable interoperability. In web and file formats, documents may specify ISO-8859-16 to indicate this particular Latin-script encoding, though UTF-8 has become the de facto standard for new content.