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.

History

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  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1968): Initial version, superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1972): Superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1976-10): Superseded
  • Recommendation V.3 IA5 (1980-11): Superseded
  • Recommendation T.50 IA5 (1984-10): Superseded
  • Recommendation T.50 IA5 (1988-11-25): Superseded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

Use

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.

Character set

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

IA5 character set
0123456789ABCDEF
0xNULSOHSTXETXEOTENQACKBELBSHTLFVTFFCRSOSI
1xDLEDC1DC2DC3DC4NAKSYNETBCANEMSUBESCFSGSRSUS
2xSP!"#$%&'()*+,-./
3x0123456789:;<=>?
4x@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
5xPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
6x`abcdefghijklmno
7xpqrstuvwxyz{|}~DEL

Standardisation

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

See also

External links