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 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...

series of ASCII-based standard

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s. 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 In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable character (computing), characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a s ...

916 (

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several character encoding schemes (referred to as "transformation formats")—i ...

s 916 and 5012) to it. This character set was also adopted by Israeli Standard SI1311:2002, with some extensions. ISO-8859-8 is the

IANA The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet P ...

preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the

C0 and C1 control codes The C0 and C1 control code or control character sets define control codes for use in text by computer systems that use ASCII and derivatives of ASCII. The codes represent additional information about the text, such as the position of a cursor, ...

from

ISO/IEC 6429 ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape charac ...

. 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- (code page 38598) is for logical order. But usually in practice, and required for XML documents, ''ISO-8859-8'' also stands for logical order text. The

WHATWG The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, ...

Encoding Standard used by

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8- 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 ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. ...

(Arabic), only to ISO-8859-8. 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 Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

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 Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

is preferred, at least for the Internet (meaning

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less than 0.1% of websites.

Code page layout

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 The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...

, new shekel sign and more advanced explicit bidirectional formatting.

References

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
(Hebrew) * ISO-IR registrations: ** From ECMA-121:1987 and following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988: ** Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: ** From SI 1311:2002: {{DEFAULTSORT:ISO IEC 8859-8 ISO/IEC 8859 Computer-related introductions in 1988 Hebrew alphabet

Code page layout

2002 Israeli Standard extensions

See also

References

External links