What is the difference between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1?

utf-8 character-encoding iso-8859-1
Jagadesh picture Jagadesh · Aug 13, 2011 · Viewed 424.4k times · Source

What is the difference between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1?

Answer

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams picture Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams · Aug 13, 2011

UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding that can represent any Unicode character. ISO 8859-1 is a single-byte encoding that can represent the first 256 Unicode characters. Both encode ASCII exactly the same way.

Related questions

How do I convert between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 in Java?

Does anyone know how to convert a string from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and back in Java? I'm getting a string from the web and saving it in the RMS (J2ME), but I want to preserve the special chars …

Read More
Convert latin1 characters on a UTF8 table into UTF8

Only today I realized that I was missing this in my PHP scripts: mysql_set_charset('utf8'); All my tables are InnoDB, collation "utf8_unicode_ci", and all my VARCHAR columns are "utf8_unicode_ci" as well. I have …

Read More
Why does Java's String.getBytes() uses "ISO-8859-1"

from java.lang.StringCoding : String csn = (charsetName == null) ? "ISO-8859-1" : charsetName; This is what is used from Java.lang.getBytes() , in linux jdk 7 I was always under the impression that UTF-8 is the default charset ? Thanks

Read More