8-bit
8-bit in character encoding
An 8-bit encoding uses all 8 binary digits of a byte, doubling the 7-bit ASCII range from 128 to 256 characters (decimal 0-255). The first 128 positions match standard ASCII exactly. Positions 128-255 vary by encoding - CP437 fills them with box-drawing characters and accented letters for the IBM PC, while ISO-8859-1 uses them for Western European characters and Windows-1252 adds curly quotes and the euro sign.
This inconsistency is the root cause of mojibake: text saved as CP1252 but read as ISO-8859-1 renders the wrong glyphs for codes 128-159, because those 32 positions map to different characters in each encoding. Use our encoding comparison tool to see exactly which positions differ between any two 8-bit encodings.
This inconsistency is the root cause of mojibake: text saved as CP1252 but read as ISO-8859-1 renders the wrong glyphs for codes 128-159, because those 32 positions map to different characters in each encoding. Use our encoding comparison tool to see exactly which positions differ between any two 8-bit encodings.