ISO/IEC 8859-8

ISO-8859-8: Latin/Hebrew

MIME / IANA	ISO-8859-8
Alias(es)	iso-ir-138, hebrew, csISOLatinHebrew
Language(s)	Hebrew, English
Standard	ISO/IEC 8859-8, ECMA-121, SI 1311
Classification	extended ASCII, ISO 8859
Based on	DEC Hebrew (8-bit), ISO/IEC 8859-1
Other related encoding(s)	Windows-1255

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 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings. 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 916 (CCSIDs 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 preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. 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-I (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 Encoding Standard used by HTML5 treats ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I 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 (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 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 is preferred, at least for the Internet (meaning UTF-8, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less than 0.1% of websites.

Code page layout

ISO/IEC 8859-8

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

0x

1x

2x

SP

!

"

#

$

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/

3x

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?

4x

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

5x

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

\

]

^

_

6x

`

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

7x

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

|

}

~

8x

9x

Ax

NBSP

¢

£

¤

¥

¦

§

¨

©

×

«

¬

SHY

®

¯

Bx

°

±

²

³

´

µ

¶

·

¸

¹

÷

»

¼

½

¾

Cx

Dx

‗

Ex

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

ך

כ

ל

ם

מ

ן

Fx

נ

ס

ע

ף

פ

ץ

צ

ק

ר

ש

ת

LRM

RLM

  Different from both DEC Hebrew (8-bit) and ISO-8859-1.

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, new shekel sign and more advanced explicit bidirectional formatting.

SI1311:2002

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

Dx

€

₪

LRO

RLO

PDF

‗

Ex

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

ך

כ

ל

ם

מ

ן

Fx

נ

ס

ע

ף

פ

ץ

צ

ק

ר

ש

ת

LRE

RLE

LRM

RLM

  Absent from ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999, added in SI1311:2002.

See also

• 8-bit DEC Hebrew (similar DEC code page)
• Code page 1255 (similar Windows code page)
• SI 960
• 7-bit DEC Hebrew

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 Archived 2005-11-24 at the Wayback Machine (Hebrew)
• ISO-IR registrations:
  • From ECMA-121:1987 and following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1988: European Computer Manufacturers Association (1987-07-31). ISO-IR-138: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: Standards Institution of Israel (1998-05-01). ISO-IR-198: Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  • From SI 1311:2002: Standards Institution of Israel (2004-07-20). ISO-IR-234: Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.