What languages does ISO-8859-2 cover?

Latin-2 covers Central and Eastern European languages that use the Latin script: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian, and others. It includes letters like ą, č, ő, ž, and ł that plain ASCII or Latin-1 lack.

How big is each character?

ISO-8859-2 is a single-byte encoding, so every character maps to exactly one byte from 0 to 255. Bytes 0x00 to 0x7F are identical to ASCII; bytes 0xA0 to 0xFF hold the Central European letters and symbols.

Why is a character shown as unmapped?

ISO-8859-2 only has 256 code points. Characters outside its repertoire — for example Cyrillic, CJK, emoji, or the euro sign — have no Latin-2 byte and are marked unmapped rather than silently replaced.

How does this differ from Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)?

Latin-1 targets Western European languages and lacks the accented letters Central European languages need, such as ł, ő, and ž. Latin-2 reassigns the upper half of the table to those letters, so the same byte means different characters in each.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The mapping is built in your browser from the native decoder and applied locally. Nothing is uploaded, so it is safe for private text.

ISO-8859-2 / Latin-2 Encoder

ISO-8859-2, also called Latin-2, is the single-byte character set for Central and Eastern European languages written in the Latin alphabet. It keeps ASCII in the lower half and packs letters like ą, č, ő, ž, and ł into the upper half. This tool shows the exact Latin-2 byte for each character of your text.

How it works

The mapping is a fixed 256-entry table. Bytes 0x00–0x7F are identical to ASCII, so plain English text encodes the same way it would in any ASCII-compatible charset. Bytes 0xA0–0xFF are where Latin-2 differs: each holds a specific Central European letter or symbol.

To guarantee the table is exactly the official one, the tool builds it in your browser by decoding every byte 0x00–0xFF with the platform’s native ISO-8859-2 decoder, then inverts that map for encoding. Each input character is looked up; if it has a Latin-2 byte it is shown in hex, and if not it is flagged as unmapped.

Example and notes

The Polish pangram "Pchnąć w tę łódź jeża" encodes with ą as 0xB1, ł as 0xB3, ó as 0xF3, ź as 0xBF, and ż as 0xBF’s neighbour 0xBF region — each a single byte.
Latin-2 has no euro sign, no Cyrillic, and no CJK; those will appear as unmapped. For full coverage of any script, use UTF-8 instead.
The same upper-half byte means different things across the ISO-8859 family, so always pair the bytes with the charset name when storing or transmitting.