ISO88598

ISO88598 is the shorthand used for ISO/IEC 8859-8, commonly known as Latin/Hebrew. It is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of eight-bit single-byte character encodings designed to extend ASCII by providing representation for Hebrew letters while preserving as many Latin characters as possible. The standard was published in 1988 by ISO and has seen limited revisions; in practice, many legacy systems that needed Hebrew support used this encoding or other region-specific schemes, with Unicode later becoming the dominant standard.

The encoding maps the standard ASCII range (0x00–0x7F) to identical control and printable characters, while the upper half (0x80–0xFF) contains Hebrew letters and a small set of additional symbols. This arrangement allowed Hebrew text to be intermixed with Latin text on systems that did not yet support Unicode, albeit with right-to-left text rendering considerations.

Usage and legacy: ISO88598 was widely used in historical Hebrew-language software, document interchange, and older email and data storage formats. Its practical use declined as Unicode-based encodings (such as UTF-8) became the standard for multilingual text, simplifying handling of bidirectional scripts and a broader range of symbols.

Relation to modern systems: Modern applications typically use Unicode, which can represent ISO-8859-8 characters without loss. Some legacy data may still specify ISO-8859-8 as the character set in files or web content, but new development generally favors Unicode. When interfacing with older data, explicit encoding handling is required to interpret bytes correctly.

See also: ISO/IEC 8859, ISO-8859-8, Windows-1255, Hebrew alphabet.