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).