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T.50 (standard)

ITU-T recommendation T.50 specifies the International Reference Alphabet (IRA), formerly International Alphabet No. 5 (IA5), a character encoding. ASCII is the U.S. variant of that character set.

The original version from November 1988 corresponds to ISO 646. The current version is from September 1992.

01History

At the beginning was the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2), a five-bit code. IA5 is an improvement, based on seven-bit bytes.

  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1968): Initial version, superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1972): Superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1976-10): Superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1980-11): Superseded
  • Recommendation T.50 IA5 (1984-10): Superseded
  • Recommendation T.50 IA5 (1988-11-25): Superseded
  • Recommendation T.50 IRA (1992-09-18): In force

02Use

The IA5STRING string type in ASN.1 is restricted to characters in IA5. This standard is referenced by other standards such as RFC 3939 ("Calling Line Identification for Voice Mail Messages"). It is also used by some analog modems such as Cisco ones.

03Character set

The following table shows the IA5 character set. Each character is shown with the code point of its Unicode equivalent.

IA5 character set
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0x NUL SOH STX ETX EOT ENQ ACK BEL  BS   HT   LF   VT   FF   CR   SO   SI  
1x DLE DC1 DC2 DC3 DC4 NAK SYN ETB CAN  EM  SUB ESC  FS   GS   RS   US 
2x  SP  ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
3x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
4x @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
5x P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
6x ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
7x p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ DEL
  Undefined, showing instead the ASCII character at that location)   A character that, in some regions, can be combined with a previous character as a diacritic using the backspace character, which may affect glyph choice.

04Standardisation

  • Identical standard: ISO/IEC 646:1991 (Twinned)
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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article T.50 (standard), written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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