ISO/IEC 8859-2, informally known as Latin-2, is an 8-bit character encoding standard created to support Central and Eastern European languages that use the Latin script. First published in 1987, it acts as a historical extension to the original 7-bit US-ASCII standard. It provides an extra 128 character slots to accommodate regional diacritics and special symbols. Structure of the Character Table
The table functions as a single-byte encoding scheme capped at 256 total code points (spanning hexadecimal values 0x00 to 0xFF). It breaks down into three core zones:
0x00 to 0x7F (0–127): Standard US-ASCII. This block is completely identical to traditional ASCII. It includes standard English letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters (like Backspace and Enter).
0x80 to 0x9F (128–159): C1 Control Characters. These slots are reserved for invisible control functions and do not display printable shapes.
0xA0 to 0xFF (160–255): The Extended Latin-2 Alphabet. This regional block houses 191 printable graphic characters specifically mapped for non-English alphabets. Language Coverage
While its sister encoding, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), was built exclusively for Western European languages, Latin-2 maps the essential diacritics for a wide range of Slavic and European nations. Notable language implementations include:
ISO 8859-1 vs ISO 8859-2 – A Comprehensive Comparison – MojoAuth
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