ISO/IEC 8859-8

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.[2][3][4] This character set was also adopted by Israeli Standard SI1311:2002, with some extensions.

ISO-8859-8: Latin/Hebrew

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

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.[5]

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[6] (meaning UTF-8, the dominant encoding for web pages). ISO-8859-8 is used by less that 0.1% of websites.[7]

Code page layout

ISO/IEC 8859-8[8][9][10][11]

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
0_ 0
1_ 16
2_ 32	SP 0020	! 0021	" 0022	# 0023	$ 0024	% 0025	& 0026	' 0027	( 0028	) 0029	* 002A	+ 002B	, 002C	- 002D	. 002E	/ 002F
3_ 48	0 0030	1 0031	2 0032	3 0033	4 0034	5 0035	6 0036	7 0037	8 0038	9 0039	: 003A	; 003B	< 003C	= 003D	> 003E	? 003F
4_ 64	@ 0040	A 0041	B 0042	C 0043	D 0044	E 0045	F 0046	G 0047	H 0048	I 0049	J 004A	K 004B	L 004C	M 004D	N 004E	O 004F
5_ 80	P 0050	Q 0051	R 0052	S 0053	T 0054	U 0055	V 0056	W 0057	X 0058	Y 0059	Z 005A	[ 005B	\ 005C	] 005D	^ 005E	_ 005F
6_ 96	` 0060	a 0061	b 0062	c 0063	d 0064	e 0065	f 0066	g 0067	h 0068	i 0069	j 006A	k 006B	l 006C	m 006D	n 006E	o 006F
7_ 112	p 0070	q 0071	r 0072	s 0073	t 0074	u 0075	v 0076	w 0077	x 0078	y 0079	z 007A	{ 007B	| 007C	} 007D	~ 007E
8_ 128
9_ 144
A_ 160	NBSP 00A0		¢ 00A2	£ 00A3	¤ 00A4	¥ 00A5	¦ 00A6	§ 00A7	¨ 00A8	© 00A9	× 00D7	« 00AB	¬ 00AC	SHY 00AD	® 00AE	¯ 00AF
B_ 176	° 00B0	± 00B1	² 00B2	³ 00B3	´ 00B4	µ 00B5	¶ 00B6	· 00B7	¸ 00B8	¹ 00B9	÷ 00F7	» 00BB	¼ 00BC	½ 00BD	¾ 00BE
C_ 192
D_ 208																‗ 2017
E_ 224	א 05D0	ב 05D1	ג 05D2	ד 05D3	ה 05D4	ו 05D5	ז 05D6	ח 05D7	ט 05D8	י 05D9	ך 05DA	כ 05DB	ל 05DC	ם 05DD	מ 05DE	ן 05DF
F_ 240	נ 05E0	ס 05E1	ע 05E2	ף 05E3	פ 05E4	ץ 05E5	צ 05E6	ק 05E7	ר 05E8	ש 05E9	ת 05EA			LRM 200E	RLM 200F

  Letter   Number   Punctuation   Symbol   Other   Undefined

  Different from DEC Hebrew (8-bit) to match ISO-8859-1.

  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.[12]

SI1311:2002[12]

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
D_ 208										€ 20AC	₪ 20AA	LRO 202D	RLO 202E	PDF 202C		‗ 2017
E_ 224	א 05D0	ב 05D1	ג 05D2	ד 05D3	ה 05D4	ו 05D5	ז 05D6	ח 05D7	ט 05D8	י 05D9	ך 05DA	כ 05DB	ל 05DC	ם 05DD	מ 05DE	ן 05DF
F_ 240	נ 05E0	ס 05E1	ע 05E2	ף 05E3	פ 05E4	ץ 05E5	צ 05E6	ק 05E7	ר 05E8	ש 05E9	ת 05EA	LRE 202A	RLE 202B	LRM 200E	RLM 200F

  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

References

1. Character Sets, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), 2018-12-12
2. "Code page 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2017-02-16.
3. "CCSID 916 information document". Archived from the original on 2014-11-29.
4. "CCSID 5012 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
5. van Kesteren, Anne. "9. Legacy single-byte encodings". Encoding Standard. WHATWG. Note: ISO-8859-8 and ISO-8859-8-I are distinct encoding names, because ISO-8859-8 has influence on the layout direction. And although historically this might have been the case for ISO-8859-6 and "ISO-8859-6-I" as well, that is no longer true.
6. John, Nicholas A. (2013). "The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode, Hebrew, and Globalization". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (3): 321–338. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12015. ISSN 1083-6101. Background: the problem of Hebrew and the Internet
7. "Usage Statistics of ISO-8859-8 for Websites, January 2019". w3techs.com. Retrieved 2019-01-17.
8. Code Page CPGID 00916 (pdf) (PDF), IBM
9. Code Page CPGID 00916 (txt), IBM
10. International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-916_P100-1995.ucm, 2002-12-03
11. International Components for Unicode (ICU), ibm-5012_P100-1999.ucm, 2002-12-03
12. Standards Institution of Israel. "ISO-IR 234: Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes" (PDF). Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (ITSCJ/IPSJ).

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999
• Revisions of the ECMA standard:
  • Standard ECMA-121 - 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphics Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF) (1 ed.). European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). July 1987. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2016-02-15.
  • Standard ECMA-121 - 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphics Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF) (2 ed.). European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). December 2000. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2016-02-15. ()
• Israeli Standard SI1311:2002 (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). Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (ITSCJ/IPSJ). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2019-08-17.
  • Following ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 and ECMA-121:2000: Standards Institution of Israel (1998-05-01). ISO-IR 198 - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet (PDF). Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (ITSCJ/IPSJ). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2017-02-15.
  • From SI 1311:2002: Standards Institution of Israel (2004-07-20). ISO-IR 234 - Latin/Hebrew character set for 8-bit codes (PDF). Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (ITSCJ/IPSJ). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-15. Retrieved 2017-02-15.