ISO/IEC 8859-8

ISO/IEC 8859-8, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings. ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 from 1999 represents its second and current revision, preceded by the first edition ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988 in 1988. It is informally referred to as Latin/Hebrew. ISO/IEC 8859-8 covers all the Hebrew letters, but no Hebrew vowel signs. IBM assigned code page 916 (CCSIDs 916 and 5012) to it.^[2][3][4] This character set was also adopted by Israeli Standard SI1311:2002, with some extensions.

ISO-8859-8: Latin/Hebrew

MIME / IANA	ISO-8859-8
Alias(es)	iso-ir-138, hebrew, csISOLatinHebrew[1]
Language(s)	Hebrew, English
Standard	ISO/IEC 8859-8, ECMA-121, SI 1311
Classification	extended ASCII, ISO 8859
Based on	DEC Hebrew (8-bit), ISO/IEC 8859-1
Other related encoding(s)	Windows-1255
v t e

ISO-8859-8 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The text is (usually) in logical order, so bidi processing is required for display. Nominally ISO-8859-8 (code page 28598) is for “visual order”, and ISO-8859-8-I (code page 38598) is for logical order. But usually in practice, and required for XML documents,^{[citation needed]} ISO-8859-8 also stands for logical order text. The WHATWG Encoding Standard used by HTML5 treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I as distinct encodings with the same mapping due to influence on the layout direction, but notes that this no longer applies to ISO-8859-6 (Arabic), only to ISO-8859-8.^[5]

There is also ISO-8859-8-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused.

The Microsoft Windows code page for Hebrew, Windows-1255, is mostly an extension of ISO/IEC 8859-8 without C1 controls, except for the omission of the double underscore, and replacement of the generic currency sign (¤) with the sheqel sign (₪). It adds support for vowel points as combining characters, and some additional punctuation.

Over a decade after the publication of that standard, Unicode is preferred, at least for the Internet^[6] (meaning UTF-8, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less than 0.1% of websites.^[7]

Code page layout

ISO/IEC 8859-8^{[8][9][10][11]}

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

¢

£

¤

¥

¦

§

¨

©

×

«

¬

SHY

®

¯

Bx

°

±

²

³

´

µ

¶

·

¸

¹

÷

»

¼

½

¾

Cx

Dx

‗

Ex

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

ך

כ

ל

ם

מ

ן

Fx

נ

ס

ע

ף

פ

ץ

צ

ק

ר

ש

ת

LRM

RLM

  Different from both DEC Hebrew (8-bit) and ISO-8859-1.

FD is left-to-right mark (U+200E) and FE is right-to-left mark (U+200F), as specified in a newer amendment as ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999.

2002 Israeli Standard extensions

Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 matches ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 except for a number of additional character allocations for the euro sign, new shekel sign and more advanced explicit bidirectional formatting.^[12]

SI1311:2002^[12]

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

Dx

€

₪

LRO

RLO

PDF

‗

Ex

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

ך

כ

ל

ם

מ

ן

Fx

נ

ס

ע

ף

פ

ץ

צ

ק

ר

ש

ת

LRE

RLE

LRM

RLM

  Absent from ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999, added in SI1311:2002.

See also

• 8-bit DEC Hebrew (similar DEC code page)
• Code page 1255 (similar Windows code page)
• SI 960
• 7-bit DEC Hebrew

References

1. Character Sets, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), 2018-12-12
2. "Code page 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2017-02-16.
3. "CCSID 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2014-11-29.
4. "CCSID 5012 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
5. van Kesteren, Anne. "9. Legacy single-byte encodings". Encoding Standard. WHATWG. Note: ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I are distinct encoding names, because ISO-8859-8 has influence on the layout direction. And although historically this might have been the case for ISO-8859-6 and "ISO-8859-6-I" as well, that is no longer true.
6. John, Nicholas A. (2013). "The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode, Hebrew, and Globalization". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (3): 321–338. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12015. ISSN 1083-6101. Background: the problem of Hebrew and the Internet
7. "Usage Statistics of ISO-8859-8 for Websites, January 2019". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2019-01-17.
8. Code Page CPGID 00916 (pdf) (PDF), IBM
9. Code Page CPGID 00916 (txt), IBM
10. International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-916_P100-1995.ucm, 2002-12-03
11. International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-5012_P100-1999.ucm, 2002-12-03
12. Standards Institution of Israel. ISO-IR-234: Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999
• Standard ECMA-121 - 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphics Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet
• Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 Archived 2005-11-24 at the Wayback Machine (Hebrew)
• ISO-IR registrations:
  • From ECMA-121:1987 and following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988: European Computer Manufacturers Association (1987-07-31). ISO-IR-138: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: Standards Institution of Israel (1998-05-01). ISO-IR-198: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • From SI 1311:2002: Standards Institution of Israel (2004-07-20). ISO-IR-234: Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.