ISO 8859 is a family of
Character Sets standardized by
ISO. All ISO 8859 variants are 8-bit
Character Sets, containing a total of 256 characters. The variants are identified by a trailing number indicating the specific variant, for example
ISO 8859-1 for the Latin-1 character set. The first half of the variants (characters 0-127) is always occupied by the
ASCII Character Set, while the second half (characters 128-255) is occupied by characters specific to the variant.