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Character Set Tables

The following links are to character set tables in a uniform format, in which each character is included literally, its code shown in four ways (decimal, row/column, octal, hexadecimal), and its name given from the corresponding standard (if any), or else its Unicode name, or failing that a short-form name. "C1 Safe" tells whether the character set conforms to international standards and reserves the area 0x80-0x9f for control characters. Character sets that are not C1-Safe are not suitable for cross-platform data interchange.

Each table includes an HTML file with an announcer for its character set, so the characters should appear correctly in your Web browser if it supports HTML character-set declarations of the following form: 

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

in which "charset" names are from the IANA / MIME registry.

If the characters do not display correctly in your browser, it means your browser does not understand the declaration, or it does not support that character set, or you don't have an appropriate font. However, you can still save the file and use it locally.

If you save a table, you can use it (you might want to keep only the part between <pre> and </pre>) to test character-set aware software. For example, if you save it on a host, then make a terminal connection (ssh, telnet, dialup, whatever) from your desktop computer to the host, you can see if your character-set definitions are working, and/or if you are using an appropriate font.

Note that nonprintable characters such as Soft Hyphen are likely to occupy no space in the display. Even though the brackets appear to be empty, there really is a character between them.

Just a few tables to begin with. If you need one that's not here, let me know and I'll add it.

Table IANA/MIME Script C1 Safe Remarks
US ASCII / ISO 646 IRV US-ASCII Latin N/A USA
KOI-7 / Short KOI   Cyrillic N/A USSR
ISO 8859-1 Latin Alphabet 1 ISO-8859-1 Latin Yes West Europe
ISO 8859-2 Latin Alphabet 2 ISO-8859-2 Latin Yes East Europe
ISO 8859-3 Latin Alphabet 3 ISO-8859-3 Latin Yes West Europe / Turkey
ISO 8859-4 Latin Alphabet 4 ISO-8859-4 Latin Yes North & West Europe 
ISO 8859-5 Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet ISO-8859-5 Cyrillic Yes  
ISO 8859-6 Latin/Arabic Alphabet ISO-8859-6 Arabic Yes  
ISO 8859-7 Latin/Greek Alphabet ISO-8859-7 Greek Yes  
ISO 8859-8 Latin/Hebrew Alphabet ISO-8859-8 Hebrew   Yes  
ISO 8859-15 Latin Alphabet 9 ISO-8859-15 Latin Yes West Europe
DEC Multinational (MCS) DEC-MCS Latin Yes West Europe
PC Code Page 437 IBM437 Latin No West Europe
PC Code Page 850 IBM850 Latin No West Europe
PC Code Page 852 IBM852 Latin No East Europe
PC Code Page 856 (none) Cyrillic No  
PC Code Page 861 IBM861 Latin No Iceland
PC Code Page 862 IBM862 Hebrew No  
PC Code Page 866 IBM866 Cyrillic No  
Microsoft Windows Code Page 1250 windows-1250 Latin No East Europe
Microsoft Windows Code Page 1251 windows-1251 Cyrillic No  
Microsoft Windows Code Page 1252   windows-1252   Latin No West Europe
Microsoft Windows Code Page 1254   windows-1254   Latin No Turkey
Unicode UTF-8 U+0020-28FF  UTF-8   (many) No (All but CJK) (BIG!)
Unicode Gothic U+10330-1034F   UTF-8 Gothic No Unicode 3.1 Plane 1

You can find plain-text (not embedded in HTML) versions of these tables (and many more) in the Kermit FTP archive: ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/charsets/; transfer them in BINARY mode only. For any pair of files xxx.c and xxx.txt, the first is a C program to generate the table, the second is the table itself.

Also see: CSets: Supplemental Unicode Mapping Tables (Mark Leisher, New Mexico State University).

Frank da Cruz / The Kermit Project / Columbia University / Last Update: 24 Aug 2004