ISO/IEC 8859-2

ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as "Latin-2". It is generally intended for Central¹ or "Eastern European" languages that are written in the Latin script. Note that ISO/IEC 8859-2 is very different from code page 852 (MS-DOS Latin 2, PC Latin 2) which is also referred to as "Latin-2" in Czech and Slovak regions.² Almost half the use of the encoding is for Polish, and it's the main legacy encoding for Polish, while virtually all use of it has been replaced by UTF-8 (on the web).

ISO-8859-2 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. Less than 0.04% of all web pages use ISO-8859-2 as of October 2022.³⁴ Microsoft has assigned code page 28592 a.k.a. Windows-28592 to ISO-8859-2 in Windows. IBM assigned code page 912 to ISO 8859-2,⁵ until that code page was extended in 1999.⁶ Code page 1111 is similar, but replaces byte B0 ° (degree sign) with U+02DA ˚ (ring above).

Windows-1250 is similar to ISO-8859-2 and has all the printable characters it has and more. However a few of them are rearranged (unlike Windows-1252, which keeps all printable characters from ISO-8859-1 in the same place).

These code values can be used for the following languages:

Differences from ISO-8859-1 have the Unicode code point number underneath.