WE8

WE8, short for Western European 8-bit, is a designation used by Oracle to describe a family of single-byte character sets intended for Western European languages. These encoding schemes map the first 128 code points to ASCII and provide additional code points in the 128–255 range for Latin letters with diacritics and other symbols commonly used in Western European text.

Common members include WE8ISO8859P1 (Latin-1 or ISO/IEC 8859-1) and WE8MSWIN1252 (Windows-1252). The WE8 family is used as a prefix in Oracle character set names, corresponding to different 8-bit Western European mappings. WE8 encodings were widely used in Oracle databases before Unicode adoption and remain in use for legacy systems that require compatibility with older applications and data.

Limitations and migration considerations: as 8-bit encodings, WE8 cannot represent characters outside Western European scripts, such as Cyrillic, Greek beyond basic forms, or many Asian characters. They require data conversion when migrating to Unicode, and applications must handle potential character set mismatches. Modern Oracle deployments typically use Unicode encodings, such as AL32UTF8, which support a wide range of languages. The WE8 family remains relevant primarily for compatibility with older databases and data that were created under these encodings.