Character Sets

Character Sets and Languages

Character Sets (Language Scripts)

You may see the following tags in web pages: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> Other common charset Values: us-ascii & windows-1252 (IBM Extended Character Set - ECS) These are basically the same. Other character sets are listed below. The first 128 characters are control characters and the standard letters, numbers, and special chaaracters (punctuation, +, /, =, ...). The extended characters (128-256)(80-FF octal) include multinational characters and things like cent "¢", pound "£", copyright "©". The 8-bit character file here has the printable characters from 32-255. The extended characters are standardized for web pages, but when viewed in native text editors may appear differently in different operating systems. e.g. Windows, Macintosh OS, and UNIX. Other HTML Coding for Character Sets

HTML also uses something called character entity references to specify characters (e.g. © or © for obtaining the copyright sign ©) The codes (e.g. 169) are the same as the Extended ANSI character codes.
Character Entity Ref. codes also exist for other characters such as greek letters
and mathmatical symols. See The Problem with Em Õn Em and othe special characters for a good explanation. Notation Notation for Space Octal Decimal Hex \040 32 \x20 URL's use Hex characters e.g. %20 for space. Character entity references use the decimal char e.g.  

The most common standard is ANSI X3.4-1968 which is commonly called US-ASCII or simply ASCII is defined in RFC1345 is the same as ISO-8859-1 (Latin1).

International Standards Orginization (ISO) 8859 and Microsoft Codepages are other common standards.

BOLD - Prefered MIME Name
US-ASCII (U.S. national variant of ISO/IEC 646. Formally, the U.S. standard
                                  ANSI X3.4.)
ISO-8859-1 - Latin-1 Westerm European (Default)ANSI (windows-1252)
ISO-8859-2 - Latin-2 East European (Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak)
                    (windows-1250)
ISO-8859-3 - Latin-3 South European
ISO-8859-4 - Latin-4 North European (Baltic)
ISO-8859-5 - Cyrillic (Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Buryat, Byelorussian, Karakalpak,
             Kazakh, Khalkha, Kirghiz, Macedonian, Moldavian, Russian, Serbian,
             Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian and Uzbek languages)
ISO-8859-6 - Arabic (Arabic, Farsi [Iran], Jawi, Kurdish, Pashto [Afghanistan],
                   Persian, Sindhi and Urdu [Pakistan], Panjabi)
ISO-8859-7 - Greek
ISO-8859-8 - Hebrew
ISO-8859-9 - Latin-5 Turkish  (windows-1254)
ISO-8859-10 - Latin-6 Nordic
 2 Byte (16 bit) codes
 UTF-8  - ISO-10646  Unicode
 Big5   - Chinese Traditional (Taiwan, HongKong)
 EUC-TW - Chinese Traditional
 GB2312  - Chinese Simplified (China mainland, Singapore and Malaysia)
 GB - (GuoBiao) Chinese Simplified
 GBK - Chinese Simplified
 HZ - Chinese Simplified
 ISO-2022-GB - an emerging new international Internet standard for encoding Chinese text

 EUC-JP  Japanese
 EUC-JIS  Japanese
 Shift_JIS  Japanese
 ISO-2022-JP  Japanese
 ISO-2022-JP2  Japanese
 ISO-2022-KR  Korean
 KSC5601 - Korean
 EUC-KR - Korean
 KSC5601
 KO18-R - Cyrillic
 KO18-U - Cyrillic
 Devanagari (Bhojpuri, Bihari, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit.
            It is also used for writing Panjabi by Indians who are not Sikhs)
Gujarati  (Indian State of Gujarat)
Gurmukhi (Panjabi[Pakstan and  India]
           Panjabi can also be written with Devanagari and Arabic)
Bengali  Bengali [Bangladesh]

Thai
Vietnamese


 (Character sets recognized in Netscape 1.1 were us-ascii, iso-8859-1, iso-2022-jp,
 x-sjis, x-euc-jp, x-mac-roman)
 Central European

Other: See Allan Wood's Unicode Page

Armenian
Bengali
Block Elements
Bopomofo
Bopomofo Extended
Box Drawing
Braille Patterns
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
Cherokee
Dingbats
Ethiopic
Georgian

Hangul Compatibility Jamo
Hangul Jamo
Hangul Syllables
Hebrew
High Surrogates
Hiragana
Ideographic Description Characters
IPA Extensions
Kanbun
KangXi Radicals
Kannada
Katakana

Khmer
Lao
Malayalam
Mathematical Operators
Miscellaneous Symbols
Miscellaneous Technical
Mongolian
Myanmar
Number Forms
Ogham
Oriya

Runic
Sinhala
Syriac
Tamil
Telugu
Thaana
Thai
Tibetan
"Unified Canadian
Aboriginal Syllabics"
Yi Radicals
Yi Syllables

ISO/ANSI vs characters

Characters 33-126 (letters, numbers and special characters (standard keyboard characters) are the same for ANSI and ECS, however the other characters are not the same. Eg. the British Pound character is 156 in ECS and 163 in ANSI.

Microsoft

Micorsoft has defined the Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) standard, which incorporates codepages 1250 (Eastern Europe), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1252 (US English = ANSI), 1253 (Greek) and 1254 (Turkish).

Language:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="zh">
<HTML LANG="fr">
<BLOCKQUOTE LANG="fr">
<P LANG="fr">

Common values: (See: ISO639A List)
ar - Arabic, de - German, en - english, es - Spanish, fr - french, ga - Irish,
gu - Gujarati, he - Hebrew, hi - Hindi, it - Italian, ja - japanese, ko - korean,
pa - Punjabi, yi - Yiddish, zh - Chinese

They may also contain sub-tags e.g.:
fr-CA - French Canadian
ar-EG - Egyptian Arabic
en-US - American English
zh-TW - Taiwanese Chinese

Fonts

English: Times *, Times New Roman †, Helvetica *, Arial †, Courier *

* - Standard on Macintosh and UNIX, † - Standard on Windows
Chinese Traditional: MingLiU (IE5), PMingLiU (office 2000)
Chinese Simplified: MS Song  (IE5), MS Hei  (IE5), SimSun (Office 2000)
Japanese:  MS Gothic, MS Mincho
Korean: Gulimche
Web HebrewAD and Web Hebrew Monospace
Others: (See Alan Wood's list)
FZNew XiuLi-Z11

Andale Mono
Angsana New
Apple Chancery
Arabic Newspaper
Arabic Transparent
Arial
Arial Black
Arial GEO
Arial Narrow
Arial Unicode MS
Athena Roman
Ballymun RO
Batang
Bitstream CyberBase
Bitstream CyberBit
Bitstream CyberCJK
Book Antiqua
Bookman Old Style
Capitals
Caslon (Unix)
Caslon (Windows)
Century Gothic
Century Schoolbook
Charcoal
Chicago

ClearlyU
ClearlyU Arabic
Code2000
Comic Sans MS
Cordia New
Courier Mono Thai
Courier New
Courier New GEO
David
David Transparent
Ethiopia Jiret
Fixed Miriam Transparent
Franklin Gothic Book
Franklin Gothic Demi
Franklin Gothic Demi Cond
Franklin Gothic Heavy
Franklin Gothic Medium
Franklin Gothic Medium Cond
Gadget
Garamond
Geneva
Georgia
Georgia Greek
GF Zemen Unicode
Gulim Che

Haettenschweiler
Helvetica
Hoefler Text
Impact
Iris UPC
Lucida Console
Lucida Sans
Lucida Sans Typewriter
Lucida Sans Unicode
MgOldTimes UC Pol Normal
MingLiU
Miriam
Miriam Fixed
Miriam Transparent
Monaco
Monotype Corsiva
MS Gothic
MS Hei
MS Mincho
MS Song
Nesf
New York
NunacomU
Palatino
Palatino Linotype

PMingLiU
Rod
Sand
Sibal Devanagari
SIL Yi
SImPL
SimSun
Skia
TabAvarangal2
Tahoma (Macintosh)
Tahoma (Windows)
Techno
TektonPro
Textile
Thryomanes
Times
Times New Roman
Times New Roman GEO
TITUS Cyberbit Basic
Traditional Arabic
Verdana
Vusillus Old Face

Terms

ANSI - American National Standards Institute
CJK - Chinese/Japanese/Korean
ECS - IBM Extended Character Set
EUC - Extended UNIX Code
GB (GuoBiao) - Character Set used for Simplified Chinese Characters
ISO - International Standards Organization
Big5 - Character Set used for Traditional Chinese Characters

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last updated 7 Jul 2002