ISO-8859-1, also called Latin-1, is an 8-bit encoding for Western European languages. It is the simplest legacy encoding because each byte value from 0x00 to 0xFF maps directly to the Unicode codepoint of the same number.

How does it relate to Unicode?

The first 256 Unicode codepoints, U+0000 to U+00FF, were deliberately defined to match ISO-8859-1. That is why Latin-1 encoding is a direct identity map and why it appears so often in older systems and HTTP defaults.

Why are some characters dropped?

Latin-1 has only 256 slots. Characters with a Unicode codepoint above U+00FF, such as the euro sign, curly quotes, or emoji, have no Latin-1 byte. The tool reports these as skipped rather than encoding them wrongly.

How is Latin-1 different from Windows-1252?

They agree on 0x00 to 0x7F and 0xA0 to 0xFF. The difference is the 0x80 to 0x9F range, which Latin-1 reserves for control codes while Windows-1252 uses it for printable symbols. Mixing them up causes mojibake.

When would I use Latin-1 today?

Latin-1 still appears as a default in some HTTP headers, older databases, email systems, and protocols. When decoding legacy data, knowing it is Latin-1 lets you recover accented Western European text correctly.

ISO-8859-1 / Latin-1 Encoder

ISO-8859-1, better known as Latin-1, is the most literal of the legacy encodings: every byte is simply the Unicode codepoint of the same value. This tool encodes text to Latin-1 hex and decodes it back.

How it works

Latin-1 is a direct one-to-one map over a single byte:

encode : codepoint  →  byte   (only valid for U+0000 to U+00FF)
decode : byte       →  codepoint of the same value

Because the first 256 Unicode codepoints were defined to coincide with Latin-1, encoding is just taking each character’s codepoint, and decoding is reading each byte straight back as that codepoint. Any character above U+00FF has no Latin-1 byte and is reported as skipped.

Tips and notes

Accented Western European letters such as é, ñ, and ü all fit in Latin-1 and encode to a single byte each.
Symbols like €, —, and " smart quotes do not fit — they live above U+00FF and require UTF-8 or Windows-1252.
If you need those extra symbols in a single byte, use the Windows-1252 tool, which fills the 0x80–0x9F range that Latin-1 leaves empty.