Comparing ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15

The character encodings ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 are very similar and easily confused. This leads to several typical problems. The following chart show the differences between these encodings and are useful for debugging the associated problems.

ISO-8859-1 vs. ISO-8859-15

The ISO-8859-1 character set is full; Every code point is assigned to a character. In 1999, ISO needed to make the Euro currency symbol available. There were also a few other characters that were desired. So ISO created ISO-8859-15, which is identical to ISO-8859-1 except for 8 characters.

ISO-8859-15 is often used on Unix systems in Europe, especially in France.

Typical Problems

• Due to the great similarity between the two code pages, it is difficult for encoding detection programs to correctly distingush the ISO-8859-15 encoding from ISO-8859-1. Ensure that files or Web pages are labeled and labeled correctly.
• Mislabeling text encoded in ISO-8859-15 as ISO-8859-1 will cause just the 8 characters listed in the comparison table to display and be converted incorrectly. For example, "Œ" will appear to be "¼".

Additional References

• Encoding Debug Table
• Encoding Problem: Treating UTF-8 Bytes as Latin-1
• Encoding Problem: Double Mis-Conversion
• Encoding Problem: ISO-8859-1 vs Windows-1252
• Comparing Windows-1252 vs. ISO-8859-1