Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
Extends ASCII to 256 characters, covering most Western European languages. The first 256 Unicode codepoints map 1:1 to Latin-1 bytes. Largely superseded by UTF-8 but still common in legacy systems.
Byte Structure
Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) uses fixed 1-byte encoding per character. Characters not in this encoding cannot be represented and must be replaced or transliterated.
When to Use Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
Latin-1 is appropriate when working with legacy Western European systems that pre-date Unicode adoption. Its byte values 0x00–0xFF map 1:1 to the first 256 Unicode codepoints, making it a lossless subset of UTF-8 for those characters. Avoid it in new systems; use UTF-8 instead. When reading legacy files, detect the encoding explicitly rather than assuming Latin-1.
Sample Characters in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
The table below shows how a selection of characters are represented in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). Bytes are shown in hexadecimal. Characters marked "not supported" cannot be encoded in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and would need to be replaced or transliterated when converting from Unicode.
| Character | Codepoint | Name | Bytes (Hex) | Bytes (Decimal) | Supported |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | U+0041 | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A | 41 | 65 | Yes |
| a | U+0061 | LATIN SMALL LETTER A | 61 | 97 | Yes |
| 0 | U+0030 | DIGIT ZERO | 30 | 48 | Yes |
| $ | U+0024 | DOLLAR SIGN | 24 | 36 | Yes |
| £ | U+00A3 | POUND SIGN | A3 | 163 | Yes |
| © | U+00A9 | COPYRIGHT SIGN | A9 | 169 | Yes |
| € | U+20AC | EURO SIGN | not supported | — | |
| α | U+03B1 | GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA | not supported | — | |
| А | U+0410 | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A | not supported | — | |
| 中 | U+4E2D | not supported | — | ||
| あ | U+3042 | HIRAGANA LETTER A | not supported | — | |
| ☺ | U+263A | WHITE SMILING FACE | not supported | — |
Working with Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) in Code
Every major language has built-in support for encoding conversion. The examples below show how to encode a string to Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) bytes and decode it back to a Unicode string. Always specify the encoding explicitly — never rely on system defaults, which vary by OS and locale.
# Encode a string to latin-1 bytes
text = "Hello, 世界"
encoded = text.encode("ISO-8859-1")
# Decode bytes back to a string
decoded = encoded.decode("ISO-8859-1")// Convert to latin-1
$bytes = mb_convert_encoding(
"Hello, 世界",
"ISO-8859-1",
"UTF-8"
);
// Convert back to UTF-8
$text = mb_convert_encoding(
$bytes,
"UTF-8",
"ISO-8859-1"
);// Encode to ISO-8859-1 bytes
const encoder = new TextEncoder(); // UTF-8
const bytes = encoder.encode("Hello, 世界");
// Decode bytes
const decoder = new TextDecoder("ISO-8859-1");
const text = decoder.decode(bytes);-- Create a database with Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
CREATE DATABASE mydb
ENCODING 'ISO-8859-1'
LC_COLLATE 'en_US.UTF-8';
-- Check database encoding
SELECT pg_encoding_to_char(encoding)
FROM pg_database
WHERE datname = current_database();Compare with Other Encodings
See how Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) differs from other encodings — which characters each supports and how the byte representations compare.