Latin8

Latin8 is a colloquial term used in computing to describe one of several 8-bit single-byte character encodings intended to represent Latin-script languages. It is not a formal standard; the name has been applied inconsistently across software projects and documentation. In practice, Latin8 variants share the common skeleton of ASCII (0x00–0x7F) and dedicate the high 0x80–0xFF range to extended Latin letters with diacritics, ligatures, or punctuation. However, the exact mapping of the 0x80–0xFF range differs among implementations, and there is no guaranteed cross-platform compatibility.

Historically, many operating systems and software vendors defined their own code pages for Western, Central, or Southern European languages during the 8-bit era. Latin8 has appeared as a label in some of these contexts, sometimes conflating or substituting for other encodings such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1), Windows-1252, or, in other cases, for more specialized pages. Because of this ambiguity, data labeled as Latin8 may not round-trip correctly when transferred between systems that use different mappings.

For modern software, Latin8 is generally discouraged in favor of Unicode encodings such as UTF-8, which provide unambiguous representation of virtually all characters. When encountering a dataset described as Latin8, it is important to determine the exact code page in use and convert to a standard encoding for interoperability. See also ISO/IEC 8859, Windows-125x, UTF-8.