T.51/ISO/IEC 6937

T.51 / ISO/IEC 6937:2001, Information technology — Coded graphic character set for text communication — Latin alphabet, is a multibyte extension of <a href="/facts/ASCII/vGUI33Qu">ASCII</a>, or more precisely <a href="/facts/ISO%2fIEC_646/7CdXUnTs">ISO/IEC 646</a>-IRV. It was developed in common with <a href="/facts/ITU-T/9nJwkPYx">ITU-T</a> (then <a href="/facts/CCITT/9nJwkPYx">CCITT</a>) for telematic services under the name of T.51, and first became an ISO standard in 1983. Certain byte codes are used as lead bytes for letters with <a href="/facts/Diacritic/Rw6lMzQW">diacritics</a>. The value of the lead byte often indicates which diacritic that the letter has, and the follow byte then has the ASCII-value for the letter that the diacritic is on.
ISO/IEC 6937's architects were <a href="/facts/Hugh_McGregor_Ross/6QcfUklh">Hugh McGregor Ross</a>, Peter Fenwick, Bernard Marti and Loek Zeckendorf.
ISO6937/2 defines 327 characters found in modern European languages using the <a href="/facts/Latin_alphabet/pqWVHpBz">Latin alphabet</a>. Non-Latin European characters, such as <a href="/facts/Cyrillic_script/0btN3oWC">Cyrillic</a> and <a href="/facts/Greek_alphabet/1cHwB8Dg">Greek</a>, are not included in the standard. Also, some diacritics used with the Latin alphabet like the <a href="/facts/Romanian_language/zAY3GnkL">Romanian</a> <a href="/facts/S-comma/QATq1nHP">comma</a> are not included, using cedilla instead as no distinction between cedilla and comma below was made at the time.
<a href="/facts/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority/b6MlP6zQ">IANA</a> has registered the charset names ISO_6937-2-25 and ISO_6937-2-add for two (older) versions of this standard (plus control codes). But in practice this character encoding is unused on the Internet.

T.51/ISO/IEC 6937 open-in-new

T.51/ISO/IEC 6937