difference between iso-8859 and iso-8859-1,

Question

is iso-8859 supports for latin character are i need to use iso-8859-1 in java program to read file in chinese character,and what is the difference between this

Answer 1

ISO-8859 is a standard for 8-bit character encodings. 8 bits give you 256 combinations which is OK for most extensions of the Latin alphabet but not for Chinese characters.

ISO-8859-1 is one of the "versions" of ISO-8859 supporting most Western-European languages (French, German, Spanish,...). For Central-European languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak,...) you need ISO-8859-2, etc.

One of the different points between ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-2 is the French letter è in ISO-8859-1, which is at the same position as the Czech/Slovak letter č in ISO-8859-2. That's why you could not combine these two letters in one text then.

Now with the Unicode it is possible to combine Chinese characters too.