| Latin based coded character sets for telematic services | |
| Status | In force |
|---|---|
| Year started | 1984 |
| Latest version | (09/92) September 1992 |
| Organization | ITU-T |
| Committee | Study Group VIII |
| Related standards | T.61, ETS 300 706, ISO/IEC 10367, ISO/IEC 2022, ISO 5426 |
| Domain | encoding |
| License | Freely available |
| Website | https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.51 |
| Alias(es) |
|
|---|---|
| Standard | |
| Based on | ITU T.61 |
| Other related encoding(s) | |
T.51 / ISO/IEC 6937:2001, Information technology — Coded graphic character set for text communication — Latin alphabet, is a multibyte extension of ASCII, or more precisely ISO/IEC 646-IRV.[1] It was developed in common with ITU-T (then CCITT) 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 diacritics. 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 Hugh McGregor Ross, Peter Fenwick, Bernard Marti and Loek Zeckendorf.
ISO6937/2 defines 327 characters found in modern European languages using the Latin alphabet. Non-Latin European characters, such as Cyrillic and Greek, are not included in the standard. Also, some diacritics used with the Latin alphabet like the Romanian comma are not included, using cedilla instead as no distinction between cedilla and comma below was made at the time.
IANA 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.