ISO88597

ISO 8859-7, also written ISO/IEC 8859-7, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of 8-bit single-byte character encodings designed to support specific languages and scripts. It is the Greek variant intended to represent the Greek alphabet and related characters, historically used for Greek-language text in computing environments.

In this encoding, the first 128 code points (0x00 to 0x7F) are identical to ASCII, while the upper half (0x80 to 0xFF) is allocated to Greek letters and a limited set of punctuation and symbols. The 0x80–0x9F range generally follows the same convention as other ISO 8859 encodings, containing control codes rather than printable characters.

ISO 8859-7 was commonly used in Greece and in systems that required a Greek-specific 8-bit encoding before the widespread adoption of Unicode. It is designed to be mapped to Unicode for interoperability, allowing Greek text encoded in ISO 8859-7 to be correctly converted to modern text processing environments.

Code page and compatibility notes: IBM code page 28597 corresponds to ISO 8859-7, reflecting its use in IBM systems. In Windows environments, the common Greek encoding is Windows-1253, which is a separate code page with different mappings. These code pages can pose compatibility challenges when exchanging legacy data with modern software that uses Unicode.

Current status: ISO 8859-7 is largely obsolete for new systems, having been superseded by Unicode and UTF-8. It remains relevant for legacy data and specific archival or compatibility contexts where Greek text was encoded using this standard. See also ISO/IEC 8859, Unicode, Windows code pages for related information.