Search code examples
emailencodingencodeiso-8859-1

ISO-8859-1 (True / False)


Is this a true or false statement?

Unicode is a superset of ISO-8859-1 such that the first 256 Unicode characters correspond to ISO-8859-1.


Solution

  • The encoding for specification: ISO-8859-1 only consists of ONLY 256 encoding. Meaning, there is nothing more than the 256 codes.

    True. The encoding uses only eight bits for each character, so there are only 256 possible characters.

    UTF-8 is a superset that has for its first 256 encoding code the same as ISO-8859-1.

    Not exactly correct, but essentially true.

    The ISO-8859-1 character set is the same as the first 256 characters in the Unicode character set. The UTF-8 encoding is used to encode Unicode characters. As UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding, it uses some codes in the 0-255 range as the start of multi-byte codes. This means that you can't safely decode ISO-8859-1 as UTF-8 or vice versa.

    Ref: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1