ISO/IEC 8859-2

ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as "Latin-2". It is generally intended for Central^[1] or "Eastern European" languages that are written in the Latin script. Note that ISO/IEC 8859-2 is very different from code page 852 (MS-DOS Latin 2, PC Latin 2) which is also referred to as "Latin-2" in Czech and Slovak regions.^[2] Almost half the use of the encoding is for Polish, and it's the main legacy encoding for Polish, while virtually all use of it has been replaced by UTF-8 (on the web).

ISO/IEC 8859-2

MIME / IANA	ISO-8859-2
Alias(es)	iso-ir-101, csISOLatin2, latin2, l2, IBM1111
Language(s)	(see below)
Standard	ECMA-94:1986, ISO/IEC 8859
Classification	Extended ASCII, ISO/IEC 8859
Extends	US-ASCII
Based on	ISO-8859-1
Other related encoding(s)	Windows-1250, MacCroatian
v t e

ISO-8859-2 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. Less than 0.04% of all web pages use ISO-8859-2 as of October 2022.^[3][4] Microsoft has assigned code page 28592 a.k.a. Windows-28592 to ISO-8859-2 in Windows. IBM assigned code page 912 to ISO 8859-2,^[5] until that code page was extended in 1999.^[6] Code page 1111 is similar, but replaces byte B0 ° (degree sign) with U+02DA ˚ (ring above).

Windows-1250 is similar to ISO-8859-2 and has all the printable characters it has and more. However a few of them are rearranged (unlike Windows-1252, which keeps all printable characters from ISO-8859-1 in the same place).

Language coverage

These code values can be used for the following languages:

• Albanian
• Bosnian
• Croatian
• Czech
• Finnish^{[lower-alpha 1]}
• German^{[lower-alpha 2]}
• Hungarian
• Polish
• Romanian^{[lower-alpha 3]}
• Rotokas
• Serbian Latin
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Upper Sorbian
• Lower Sorbian
• Turkmen

1. The missing letter Å is officially a part of the Finnish alphabet, however it has no native use and its usage is limited to foreign names only.
2. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially added a capital ẞ, but is not actually required as SS can be used instead.
3. This character set unifies Ș and Ț (S,T with commas below) with Ş and Ţ (S, T with cedillas), as did virtually all other character sets including Microsoft's Windows-1250 and the first version of Unicode. Unicode subsequently disunified them however, this complicated processing of Romanian data; pre-existing data and input methods would still contain the older cedilla codepoints, complicating text searching.^{[citation needed]}

Code page layout

Differences from ISO-8859-1 have the Unicode code point number underneath.

ISO/IEC 8859-2 (Latin-2)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

0x

1x

2x

SP

!

"

#

$

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/

3x

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?

4x

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

5x

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

\

]

^

_

6x

`

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

7x

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

|

}

~

8x

9x

Ax

NBSP

Ą 0104

˘ 02D8

Ł 0141

¤

Ľ 013D

Ś 015A

§

¨

Š 0160

Ş 015E

Ť 0164

Ź 0179

SHY

Ž 017D

Ż 017B

Bx

°

ą 0105

˛ 02DB

ł 0142

´

ľ 013E

ś 015B

ˇ 02C7

¸

š 0161

ş 015F

ť 0165

ź 017A

˝ 02DD

ž 017E

ż 017C

Cx

Ŕ 0154

Á

Â

Ă 0102

Ä

Ĺ 0139

Ć 0106

Ç

Č 010C

É

Ę 0118

Ë

Ě 011A

Í

Î

Ď 010E

Dx

Đ 0110

Ń 0143

Ň 0147

Ó

Ô

Ő 0150

Ö

×

Ř 0158

Ů 016E

Ú

Ű 0170

Ü

Ý

Ţ 0162

ß

Ex

ŕ 0155

á

â

ă 0103

ä

ĺ 013A

ć 0107

ç

č 010D

é

ę 0119

ë

ě 011B

í

î

ď 010F

Fx

đ 0111

ń 0144

ň 0148

ó

ô

ő 0151

ö

÷

ř 0159

ů 016F

ú

ű 0171

ü

ý

ţ 0163

˙ 02D9

See also

• Character encoding
• Polish code pages

References

1. "Microsoft Outlook Message Encodings". 10 January 2017.
2. "The Czech and Slovak Character Encoding Mess Explained". luki.sdf-eu.org. Retrieved 2022-02-27.
3. "Usage Statistics and Market Share of ISO-8859-2 for Websites, October 2022". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2022-10-23.
4. "Historical trends in the usage statistics of character encodings for websites, February 2022".
5. "Icu-data/Charset/Data/XML/Ibm-912_P100-1995.XML at main · unicode-org/Icu-data". GitHub.
6. "Icu-data/Charset/Data/Ucm/Ibm-912_P100-1999.ucm at main · unicode-org/Icu-data". GitHub.

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999
• Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
• ISO-IR 101 Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet No.2 (February 1, 1986)
• ISO 8859-2 (Latin 2) Resources