ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8 - Latin-9 Euro Converter

Convert ISO-8859-15 (Latin-9) to UTF-8 online. Supports Euro sign €, French œ, and updated European characters. Browser-based, no uploads, instant results.

Input (ISO-8859-15)

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Output (UTF-8)

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Frequently Asked Questions

ISO-8859-15, also known as Latin-9, is a single-byte character encoding released in 1999 as an update to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1). It includes the Euro sign (€) and other characters needed for modern European languages, replacing rarely-used symbols from Latin-1. It's used primarily in Western European systems that needed Euro support before UTF-8 adoption.

ISO-8859-15 replaces 8 characters from ISO-8859-1: adds € (Euro) instead of ¤ (currency sign), Š/š instead of ¦/¨, Ž/ž instead of ´/¸, Œ/œ instead of ¼/½, and Ÿ instead of ¾. These changes were made to support the Euro currency introduction in 1999 and provide better French ligature support (œ/Œ) and Eastern European character coverage (Š/š, Ž/ž).

ISO-8859-15 was created in 1999 to address the introduction of the Euro currency in European Union countries. ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) lacked the Euro sign (€), forcing systems to use workarounds or migrate entirely. Latin-9 provided a minimal update path, allowing organizations to add Euro support while maintaining single-byte encoding compatibility with existing Western European text systems.

ISO-8859-15 is used for Western European languages including French (with proper œ/Œ ligatures), German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, and Irish. It's particularly common in European government systems, financial institutions, and legacy databases that adopted it after the Euro's introduction but before UTF-8 migration became feasible.

ISO-8859-15's unique characters are: € (Euro sign, 0xA4), Š (uppercase S with caron, 0xA6), š (lowercase s with caron, 0xA8), Ž (uppercase Z with caron, 0xB4), ž (lowercase z with caron, 0xB8), Œ (uppercase OE ligature, 0xBC), œ (lowercase oe ligature, 0xBD), and Ÿ (uppercase Y with diaeresis, 0xBE). These replaced obsolete symbols from Latin-1.

Use ISO-8859-15 when working with European text that contains the Euro sign (€), French ligatures (œ/Œ in words like 'cœur' or 'œuvre'), or Eastern European names with Š/š and Ž/ž characters. If your legacy system shows these characters as boxes or incorrect symbols, converting from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8 will fix the display issues.

Look for these indicators: Euro signs (€) appearing as garbled characters, French words with œ ligatures displaying incorrectly, byte value 0xA4 representing € instead of ¤, files from European systems created between 1999-2010, or Content-Type headers showing 'charset=iso-8859-15'. Database exports from European financial systems often use this encoding for Euro currency support.

When ISO-8859-15 text is read as ISO-8859-1, you'll see: € displayed as ¤, Š/š as ¦/¨, Ž/ž as ´/¸, Œ/œ as ¼/½, and Ÿ as ¾. In French text, words like 'cœur' (heart) appear as 'c¼ur', and prices like '10€' show as '10¤'. Financial reports and European documentation become unreadable with these substitutions.

ISO-8859-15 arrived too late in the encoding evolution timeline. By 1999, UTF-8 was already gaining traction as the universal solution. Many organizations chose to skip Latin-9 entirely and migrate directly to UTF-8, which supports all world languages. The brief 10-year window (1999-2009) before UTF-8 dominance limited Latin-9 adoption to specific European sectors like banking and government.

This tool assumes uniform ISO-8859-15 encoding throughout the file. Mixed encodings (where part of the file is UTF-8 and part is ISO-8859-15) will produce incorrect results. If you have mixed content, you'll need to identify and separate the sections or use specialized tools that detect encoding boundaries. Always verify output with sample text containing €, œ, and Š characters to confirm proper conversion.

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