ISO 646 is an ISO standard that specifies international variants of the 7 bit ASCII character code. Since the ASCII code specified only the letters used in the English alphabet, other countries using the latin alphabet with extensions needed to create national variants of ASCII to be able to use their native languanges. Since universal acceptance of the 8 bit byte did not exist at that time, the national characters had to be made fit within the constraints of 7 bits, meaning that some of the existing ASCII characters had to be changed.

Some national variants of ASCII are:

CodeNational standardCountry
CACSA Z243.4Canada
DEDIN 66003Germany
DKDS 2089Denmark
GBBS 4730Great Britain
NONS 4551-1Norway
SESEN 850200_BSweden
YUJUS I.B1.002Yugoslavia

The specifics of the changes for some of these variants are given in this table:

BinaryDecimalHexASCII DEDK/NOGBSEYU
0010 00113523# ##£##
0010 01003624$ $$$¤$
0100 00006440@ §@@@Ž
0101 1011915B[ ÄÆ[ÄŠ
0101 1100925C\\ ÖØ\\ÖĐ
0101 1101935D] ÜÅ]ÅĆ
0101 1110945E^ ^^^^Č
0110 00009660` ````ž
0111 10111237B{ äæ{äš
0111 11001247C| öø|öđ
0111 11011257D} üå}åć
0111 11101267E~ ß~~~č

Later, when 8 bit characters sets gained more acceptance, the ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-2 became the preferred method of coding these variants.

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