charsetISO88591

ISO/IEC 8859-1, commonly referred to as Latin-1, is an 8-bit single-byte character encoding designed to cover Western European languages. It is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series and was published in 1987 to complement ASCII. The encoding reserves the first 128 code points for ASCII, while code points 0x80–0x9F carry C1 control codes in the standard. The range 0xA0–0xFF provides the Western European characters needed for languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, including letters with diacritics (á, é, ñ, ö, ç, ø, å, ü, etc.). The single-byte layout means each byte corresponds to one character, and there is no concept of combining glyphs.

Latin-1 is also known as ISO-8859-1 and is effectively identical to Windows code page 28591 for their printable characters; the key practical difference is how the 0x80–0x9F range is interpreted—ISO-8859-1 treats these as control codes, whereas Windows-1252 maps many of them to printable symbols. Because of historical use on the web and in email, many systems still label content as ISO-8859-1, even when Windows-1252 is in effect.

Today, ISO-8859-1 is largely replaced by Unicode encodings such as UTF-8, which cover all scripts. ISO-8859-1 remains in legacy data and in some interfaces that require Western European text. In HTML and email, it is declared with charset=ISO-8859-1 or latin1; care is needed to avoid mojibake when misinterpreted.