Latin1ISO88591

Latin1ISO88591 is an informal designation for ISO/IEC 8859-1, commonly known as Latin-1. It is an 8-bit single-byte character encoding designed for Western European languages. The first 128 code points are identical to ASCII, ensuring basic ASCII text remains compatible. Codes 0x80–0x9F are C1 control codes and are not typically used for printable characters. Codes 0xA0–0xFF carry Latin-1 graphic characters, including letters with diacritics used in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Western European languages, such as é, ñ, ö, ß, and ø. The standard does not include the euro symbol; that symbol was added later in ISO/IEC 8859-15 (Latin-9).

ISO/IEC 8859-1 was published in 1987 and became widely adopted for web pages, email, and software that required a Western European character set before the predominance of Unicode. Many systems and browsers historically advertised charset="ISO-8859-1" or similar; in practice, some environments treated ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 as similar, which led to confusion when characters in 0x80–0x9F or certain punctuation appeared differently.

Latin-1 has largely been superseded by Unicode encodings such as UTF-8, which can represent the entire range of Latin-script characters along with many other scripts. Nevertheless, ISO/IEC 8859-1 remains relevant for legacy data and systems, and its code page is sometimes referenced as IBM code page 28591 (and related nomenclature varies by platform).