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ISO-8859-1 v.s. UTF-8

Comparing the encoding variances with ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8.

  • Characters between 0 and 7F have encodings and character mappings which are identical in ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. In both encodings characters in this range are represented with a single byte.
  • Characters between 80 and 9F are not used in either encoding
  • Characters between A0 and FF have identical character mappings but in fact the encodings are different. ISO-8859-1 uses a single byte to represent each character in this range whereas UTF-8 uses two bytes to represent each character in this range.
  • ISO-8859-1 does not support any character mappings above the FF encoding value, whereas UTF-8 continues supporting encodings represented by 2, 3, and 4 byte values.