Unicode Latin 1 Characters 128-255 - A Reference to Decimal and Hex Codes

1. Background - Learn a bit of the rocky history that followed the standardization of ASCII in the 1960s.
2. Three codes - See how decimal, hexadecimal and HTML-specific characters are coded.
3. Control Characters - Review the first 32 decimals, meant to control hardware and were also assigned to characters.
4. Printable Characters - Look up the remaining 96 characters in the Unicode Latin 1 table.
5. What came next? - Discuss this in context with thousands of other characters that followed.

by Paul Alan Davis, CFA

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An Easy to Use Unicode Latin 1 ISO 8859 Code Table

For Those Just Getting Started

Beginner

ASCII codes were developed in the 1960s as a set of 128-characters used for computers to communicate with each other. Originally, this was done in the English language and keyboards at the time had about 83 keys. The remaining characters were used to control hardware. An example is the ASCII character HT which instructs the computer to tab horizontally.

Additional character sets needed new symbols, like ®, ¶, ½, and letters to incorporate the languages of the world, as in è, é, and ê.

For the next two decades, for-profit companies tried to customize the second set of 128 characters for their own needs, and after years of disagreement, one standard setting organization in Geneva was successful in defining a Standard.

The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, put forth the Standard and characters 128-255 were added to the block. The Standard, called ISO 8859-1, included letters with accents, new symbols and control characters for hardware.

Fast forward to today, we now have The Unicode Standard which is the work of both ISO and The Unicode Consortium. A recent release of Unicode version 10.0 (2017) defines 136,690 characters!

Here you will find the Unicode Latin-1 Supplement table broken in two. First are the 32 control characters that many organizations had already assigned glyphs to, causing confusion.

The second table includes the remaining 96 characters.

About Decimal and Hexadecimal Codes for Unicode Characters in HTML

In HTML, there are three common ways to enter codes.

1. Decimal - Unicode Characters using the decimal, or base-10 numerical system.
2. Hexadecimal - Unicode Characters using the hexadecimal or base-16 system.
3. HTML-specific - Several Unicode Characters can be entered using HTML-specific characters, often called HTML entities.

Unicode Latin 1 Table

The two tables below cover the second 128 characters in use today. These are commonly called Extended ASCII Characters.

Unicode Latin 1 Control Characters

This character set includes Control Characters that were originally used to control hardware. Many had taken on symbols used in the Latin languages and have HTML entity names (as noted).

Unicode Latin 1 Printable Characters

The next 96 characters are called printable characters.

Below is an example of three ways you could code the copyright character © in an HTML document.

• Decimal - ©
• Hexadecimal - ©
• HTML - ©

Related Content

• ASCII Table - the first 128 characters
• HTML Tags List
• Linux Cheat Sheet
• Vim Cheat Sheet

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