Character Code Issues

Character codes map characters to numbers encoded as one or more bytes.

ASCII

ASCII is the safest character repertoire in data transfer.

ISO Latin 1 or ISO 8859-1

Western European languages.

ISO Latin 9 or ISO 8859-15

Slight modification of ISO8859-1 to includes the Euro symbol.

ISO 10646

International standard which defines UCS.

Unicode

The more practical definition of UCS. Unicode imposes additional constraints on implementations to ensure that they treat characters uniformly across platforms and applications.