Home / Iso 8859

ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. The standard is divided into numbered, separately published parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc., each of which may be informally referred to as a standard in itself. There are currently 15 parts as of 2006 excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12 standard.

Introduction

While the bit patterns of the 95 printable ASCII characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English, most other languages that use the Latin alphabet need additional symbols not covered by ASCII, such as ß (German), ñ (Spanish), Ã¥ (Swedish and other Nordic languages) and ő (Hungarian). ISO 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit byte in order to allow positions for another 128 characters. (This bit was previously used for data transmission protocol information, or was left unused.) However, more characters were needed than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least 10 just to cover the Latin script.

The ISO 8859-n encodings only contain printable characters, and were designed to be used in conjunction with control characters mapped to the unassigned bytes. To this end a series of encodings registered with the IANA add the C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) from ISO 646 and the C1 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 127 to 159) from ISO 6429, resulting in full 8-bit character maps with most, if not all, bytes assigned. These sets have ISO-8859-n as their preferred MIME name or, in cases where a preferred MIME name isn't specified, their canonical name. Many people use the terms ISO 8859-n and ISO-8859-n interchangeably. ISO 8859-11 did not get such a charset assigned presumably because it was almost identical to TIS 620.

Characters

The ISO 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography; the standard omits symbols needed for high-quality typography, such as optional ligatures, curly quotation marks, dashes, etc. As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the ASCII and ISO 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead.

As a rule of thumb, if a character or symbol was not already part of a widely used data-processing character set and was also not usually provided on typewriter keyboards for a national language, it didn't get in. Hence the directional double quotation marks « and » used for some European languages were included, but not the directional double quotation marks “ and ” used for English and some other languages. French didn't get its œ and Œ ligatures because they could be typed as 'oe'. Ÿ, needed for all-caps text, was left out as well. These characters were, however, included later with ISO 8859-15, which also introduced the new euro sign character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the 'ij' and 'IJ' letters, because Dutch speakers had gotten used to typing these as two letters instead. Romanian did not initially get its 'Ș/ș' and 'Ț/ț' (with comma) letters, because these letters were initially unified with 'Ş/ş' and 'Ţ/ţ' (with cedilla) by the Unicode Consortium, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be glyph variants of the shapes with cedilla. However, the letters with explicit comma below were later added to the Unicode standard and are also in ISO 8859-16.

Most of the ISO 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages. Others provide non-Latin alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Most of the encodings contain only spacing characters although the Hebrew and Arabic ones do also contain combining characters. However, the standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (CJK), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions (without using combining diacritics) either. Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see Kana) would fit, but like several other alphabets of the world they aren't encoded in the ISO 8859 system.

The Parts of ISO 8859

ISO 8859 is divided into the following parts:

Part 1	Latin-1 Western European	Perhaps the most widely used part of ISO 8859, covering most Western European languages: Danish, Dutch (partial[1]), English, Faeroese, Finnish (partial[2]), French (partial<ref name="two" />), German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, and Swedish. Languages from other parts of the world are also covered, including: Eastern European Albanian, Southeast Asian Indonesian, as well as the African languages Afrikaans and Swahili. The missing euro sign and capital Ÿ are in the revised version ISO 8859-15. The corresponding IANA-approved character set ISO-8859-1 is the default encoding for legacy HTML documents and for documents transmitted via MIME messages, such as HTTP responses when the document's media type is "text" (as in "text/html").
Part 2	Latin-2 Central European	Supports those Central and Eastern European languages that use the Latin alphabet, including Bosnian, Polish, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Hungarian. The missing euro sign can be found in version ISO 8859-16.
Part 3	Latin-3 South European	Turkish, Maltese, and Esperanto. Largely superseded by ISO 8859-9 for Turkish and Unicode for Esperanto.
Part 4	Latin-4 North European	Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Sami.
Part 5	Latin/Cyrillic	Covers mostly Slavic languages that use a Cyrillic alphabet, including Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian (partial[3]).
Part 6	Latin/Arabic	Covers the most common Arabic language characters. Doesn't support other languages using the Arabic script. Needs to be BiDi and cursive joining processed for display.
Part 7	Latin/Greek	Covers the modern Greek language (monotonic orthography). Can also be used for Ancient Greek written without accents or in monotonic orthography, but lacks the diacritics for polytonic orthography. These were introduced with Unicode.
Part 8	Latin/Hebrew	Covers the modern Hebrew alphabet as used in Israel. In practice two different encodings exist, logical order (needs to be BiDi processed for display) and visual (left-to-right) order (in effect, after bidi processing and line breaking).
Part 9	Latin-5 Turkish	Largely the same as ISO 8859-1, replacing the rarely used Icelandic letters with Turkish ones. It is also used for Kurdish.
Part 10	Latin-6 Nordic	a rearrangement of Latin-4. Considered more useful for Nordic languages. Baltic languages use Latin-4 more.
Part 11	Latin/Thai	Contains most glyphs needed for the Thai language. Same as TIS 620.
non-existent Part 12	Latin/Devanagari	The work in making a part of 8859 for Devanagari was officially abandoned in 1997. ISCII and Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 cover Devanagari.
Part 13	Latin-7 Baltic Rim	Added some characters for Baltic languages which were missing from Latin-4 and Latin-6.
Part 14	Latin-8 Celtic	Covers Celtic languages such as Gaelic and the Breton language.
Part 15	Latin-9	A revision of 8859-1 that removes some little-used symbols, replacing them with the euro sign € and the letters Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ, and Ÿ, which completes the coverage of French, Finnish and Estonian.
Part 16	Latin-10 South-Eastern European	Intended for Albanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovenian, but also Finnish, French, German and Irish Gaelic (new orthography). The focus lies more on letters than symbols. The currency sign is replaced with the euro sign.

Each part of ISO 8859 is designed to support languages that often borrow from each other, so the characters needed by each language are usually accommodated by a single part. However, there are some characters and language combinations that are not accommodated without transcriptions. Efforts were made to make conversions as smooth as possible. For example, German has all its seven special chars at the same positions in all Latin variants (1-4, 9-10, 13-16), and in many positions the characters only differ in the diacritics between the sets. In particular, variants 1-4 were designed jointly, and have the property that every encoded character appears either at a given position or not at all.

Table

Comparison of the various parts of ISO 8859

Binary	Oct	Dec	Hex	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	13	14	15	16
10100000	240	160	A0	Non-breaking space (NBSP)
10100001	241	161	A1	¡	Ą	Ħ	Ą	Ё		‘		¡	Ą	ก	”	Ḃ	¡	Ą
10100010	242	162	A2	¢	˘		ĸ	Ђ		’	¢	¢	Ē	ข	¢	ḃ	¢	ą
10100011	243	163	A3	£	Ł	£	Ŗ	Ѓ		£			Ģ	ฃ	£			Ł
10100100	244	164	A4	¤				Є	¤	€	¤		Ī	ค	¤	Ċ	€
10100101	245	165	A5	Â¥	Ľ		Ĩ	Ѕ		₯	Â¥		Ĩ	ฅ	„	ċ	Â¥	„
10100110	246	166	A6	¦	Ś	Ĥ	Ļ	І		¦			Ķ	ฆ	¦	Ḋ	Š
10100111	247	167	A7	§				Ї		§				ง	§
10101000	250	168	A8	¨				Ј		¨			Ļ	จ	Ø	Ẁ	š
10101001	251	169	A9	©	Š	İ	Š	Љ		©			Đ	ฉ	©
10101010	252	170	AA	ª	Ş		Ē	Њ		ͺ	×	ª	Š	ช	Ŗ	Ẃ	ª	Ș
10101011	253	171	AB	«	Ť	Ğ	Ģ	Ћ		«			Ŧ	ซ	«	ḋ	«
10101100	254	172	AC	¬	Ź	Ĵ	Ŧ	Ќ	،	¬			Ž	ฌ	¬	Ỳ	¬	Ź
10101101	255	173	AD	soft hyphen (SHY)										ญ	SHY
10101110	256	174	AE	®	Ž		Ž	Ў			®		Ū	ฎ	®			ź
10101111	257	175	AF	¯	Ż		¯	Џ		―	¯		Ŋ	ฏ	Æ	Ÿ	¯	Ż
10110000	260	176	B0	°				А		°				ฐ	°	Ḟ	°
10110001	261	177	B1	±	ą	ħ	ą	Б		±			ą	ฑ	±	ḟ	±
10110010	262	178	B2	²	˛	²	˛	В		²			ē	ฒ	²	Ġ	²	Č
10110011	263	179	B3	³	ł	³	ŗ	Г		³			ģ	ณ	³	ġ	³	ł
10110100	264	180	B4	´				Д		΄	´		ī	ด	“	Ṁ	Ž
10110101	265	181	B5	µ	ľ	µ	ĩ	Е		΅	µ		ĩ	ต	µ	ṁ	µ	”
10110110	266	182	B6	¶	ś	ĥ	ļ	Ж		Ά	¶		ķ	ถ	¶
10110111	267	183	B7	·	ˇ	·	ˇ	З		·				ท	·	Ṗ	·
10111000	270	184	B8	¸				И		Έ	¸		ļ	ธ	ø	ẁ	ž
10111001	271	185	B9	¹	š	ı	š	Й		Ή	¹		đ	น	¹	ṗ	¹	č
10111010	272	186	BA	º	ş		ē	К		Ί	÷	º	š	บ	ŗ	ẃ	º	ș
10111011	273	187	BB	»	ť	ğ	ģ	Л	؛	»			ŧ	ป	»	Ṡ	»
10111100	274	188	BC	¼	ź	ĵ	ŧ	М		Ό	¼		ž	ผ	¼	ỳ	Œ
10111101	275	189	BD	½	˝	½	Ŋ	Н		½			―	ฝ	½	Ẅ	œ
10111110	276	190	BE	¾	ž		ž	О		Ύ	¾		ū	พ	¾	ẅ	Ÿ
10111111	277	191	BF	¿	ż		ŋ	П	؟	Ώ		¿	ŋ	ฟ	æ	ṡ	¿	ż
11000000	300	192	C0	À	Ŕ	À	Ā	Р		ΐ		À	Ā	ภ	Ą	À
11000001	301	193	C1	Á				С	ء	Α		Á		ม	Į	Á
11000010	302	194	C2	Â				Т	آ	Β		Â		ย	Ā	Â
11000011	303	195	C3	Ã	Ă		Ã	У	أ	Γ		Ã		ร	Ć	Ã		Ă
11000100	304	196	C4	Ä				Ф	ؤ	Δ		Ä		ฤ	Ä
11000101	305	197	C5	Ã…	Ĺ	Ċ	Ã…	Х	إ	Ε		Ã…		ล	Ã…			Ć
11000110	306	198	C6	Æ	Ć	Ĉ	Æ	Ц	ئ	Ζ		Æ		ฦ	Ę	Æ
11000111	307	199	C7	Ç			Į	Ч	ا	Η		Ç	Į	ว	Ē	Ç
11001000	310	200	C8	È	Č	È	Č	Ш	ب	Θ		È	Č	ศ	Č	È
11001001	311	201	C9	É				Щ	ة	Ι		É		ษ	É
11001010	312	202	CA	Ê	Ę	Ê	Ę	Ъ	ت	Κ		Ê	Ę	ส	Ź	Ê
11001011	313	203	CB	Ë				Ы	ث	Λ		Ë		ห	Ė	Ë
11001100	314	204	CC	ÃŒ	Ě	ÃŒ	Ė	Ь	ج	Μ		ÃŒ	Ė	ฬ	Ģ	ÃŒ
11001101	315	205	CD	Í				Э	ح	Ν		Í		อ	Ķ	Í
11001110	316	206	CE	Î				Ю	خ	Ξ		Î		ฮ	Ī	Î
11001111	317	207	CF	Ï	Ď	Ï	Ī	Я	د	Ο		Ï		ฯ	Ļ	Ï
11010000	320	208	D0	Ð	Đ		Đ	а	ذ	Π		Ğ	Ð	ะ	Š	Ŵ	Ð
11010001	321	209	D1	Ñ	Ń	Ñ	Ņ	б	ر	Ρ		Ñ	Ņ	ั	Ń	Ñ		Ń
11010010	322	210	D2	Ã’	Ň	Ã’	Ō	в	ز			Ã’	Ō	า	Ņ	Ã’
11010011	323	211	D3	Ó			Ķ	г	س	Σ		Ó		ำ	Ó
11010100	324	212	D4	Ô				д	ش	Τ		Ô		ิ	Ō	Ô
11010101	325	213	D5	Õ	Ő	Ġ	Õ	е	ص	Υ		Õ		ี	Ő
11010110	326	214	D6	Ö				ж	ض	Φ		Ö		ึ	Ö
11010111	327	215	D7	×				з	ط	Χ		×	Ũ	ื	×	Ṫ	×	Ś
11011000	330	216	D8	Ø	Ř	Ĝ	Ø	и	ظ	Ψ		Ø		ุ	Ų	Ø		Ű
11011001	331	217	D9	Ù	Ů	Ù	Ų	й	ع	Ω		Ù	Ų	ู	Ł	Ù
11011010	332	218	DA	Ú				к	غ	Ϊ		Ú		ฺ	Ś	Ú
11011011	333	219	DB	Û	Ű	Û		л		Ϋ		Û			Ū	Û
11011100	334	220	DC	Ãœ				м		ά		Ãœ			Ãœ
11011101	335	221	DD	Ý		Ŭ	Ũ	н		έ		İ	Ý		Ż	Ý		Ę
11011110	336	222	DE	Þ	Ţ	Ŝ	Ū	о		ή		Ş	Þ		Ž	Ŷ	Þ	Ț
11011111	337	223	DF	ß				п		ί	‗	ß		฿	ß
11100000	340	224	E0	Ã	ŕ	Ã	ā	р	ـ	ΰ	א	Ã	ā	เ	ą	Ã
11100001	341	225	E1	á				с	ف	α	ב	á		แ	į	á
11100010	342	226	E2	â				т	ق	β	ג	â		โ	ā	â
11100011	343	227	E3	ã	ă		ã	у	ك	γ	ד	ã		ใ	ć	ã		ă
11100100	344	228	E4	ä				ф	ل	δ	ה	ä		ไ	ä
11100101	345	229	E5	Ã¥	ĺ	ċ	Ã¥	х	م	ε	ו	Ã¥		ๅ	Ã¥			ć
11100110	346	230	E6	æ	ć	ĉ	æ	ц	ن	ζ	ז	æ		ๆ	ę	æ
11100111	347	231	E7	ç			į	ч	ه	η	ח	ç	į	็	ē	ç
11101000	350	232	E8	è	č	è	č	ш	و	θ	ט	è	č	่	č	è
11101001	351	233	E9	é				щ	ى	ι	י	é		้	é
11101010	352	234	EA	ê	ę	ê	ę	ъ	ي	κ	ך	ê	ę	๊	ź	ê
11101011	353	235	EB	ë				ы	ً	λ	כ	ë		๋	ė	ë
11101100	354	236	EC	ì	ě	ì	ė	ь	ٌ	μ	ל	ì	ė	์	ģ	ì
11101101	355	237	ED	í				э	ٍ	ν	ם	í		ํ	ķ	í
11101110	356	238	EE	î				ю	َ	ξ	מ	î		๎	ī	î
11101111	357	239	EF	ï	ď	ï	ī	я	ُ	ο	ן	ï		๏	ļ	ï
11110000	360	240	F0	ð	đ		đ	ȑ	ِ	π	נ	ğ	ð	๐	š	ŵ	ð	đ
11110001	361	241	F1	ñ	ń	ñ	ņ	ё	ّ	ρ	ס	ñ	ņ	๑	ń	ñ		ń
11110010	362	242	F2	ò	ň	ò	ō	ђ	ْ	ς	ע	ò	ō	๒	ņ	ò
11110011	363	243	F3	ó			ķ	ѓ		σ	ף	ó		๓	ó
11110100	364	244	F4	ô				є		τ	פ	ô		๔	ō	ô
11110101	365	245	F5	õ	ő	ġ	õ	ѕ		υ	ץ	õ		๕	ő
11110110	366	246	F6	ö				і		φ	צ	ö		๖	ö
11110111	367	247	F7	÷				ї		χ	ק	÷	ũ	๗	÷	ṫ	÷	ś
11111000	370	248	F8	ø	ř	ĝ	ø	ј		ψ	ר	ø		๘	ų	ø		ű
11111001	371	249	F9	ù	ů	ù	ų	љ		ω	ש	ù	ų	๙	ł	ù
11111010	372	250	FA	ú				њ		ϊ	ת	ú		๚	ś	ú
11111011	373	251	FB	û	ű	û		ћ		ϋ		û		๛	ū	û
11111100	374	252	FC	ü				ќ		ό		ü			ü
11111101	375	253	FD	ý		ŭ	ũ	§		ύ	LRM	ı	ý		ż	ý		ę
11111110	376	254	FE	þ	ţ	ŝ	ū	ў		ώ	RLM	ş	þ		ž	ŷ	þ	ț
11111111	377	255	FF	ÿ	˙			џ				ÿ	ĸ		’	ÿ

At position 0xA0 there's always the non breaking space and 0xAD is mostly the soft hyphen, which only shows at line breaks. Other empty fields are either unassigned or the system used isn't able to display them.

There are new additions as ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003 and ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 versions. LRM stands for left-to-right mark (U+200E) and RLM stands for right-to-left mark (U+200F).

Relationship to Unicode and the UCS

Since 1991, the Unicode Consortium has been working with ISO to develop the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set (UCS) in tandem. This pair of standards was created to unify the ISO 8859 character repertoire, among others, by assigning each character, initially, to a 16-bit code value, with some code values left unassigned. Over time, their models adapted to map characters to abstract numeric code points rather than fixed bit-width values, so that more code points and encoding methods could be supported.

Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 currently assign about 100,000 characters to a code space consisting of over a million code points, and they define several standard encodings that are capable of representing every available code point. The standard encodings of Unicode and the UCS use sequences of one to four 8-bit code values (UTF-8), sequences of one or two 16-bit code values (UTF-16), or one 32-bit code value (UTF-32 or UCS-4). There is also an older encoding that uses one 16-bit code value (UCS-2), capable of representing one-seventeenth of the available code points. Of these encoding forms, only UTF-8's byte sequences are in a fixed order; the others are subject to platform-dependent byte ordering issues that may be addressed via special codes or indicated via out-of-band means.

Newer editions of ISO 8859 express characters in terms of their Unicode/UCS names and the U+nnnn notation, effectively causing each part of ISO 8859 to be a Unicode/UCS character encoding scheme that maps a very small subset of the UCS to single 8-bit bytes. The first 256 characters in Unicode and the UCS are identical to those in ISO-8859-1.

Single byte character sets including the parts of ISO 8859 and derivatives of them were favored throughout the 1990s, having the advantages of being well-established and more easily implemented in software: the equation of one byte to one character is simple and adequate for most single-language applications, and there are no combining characters or variant forms.

As the relative cost, in computing resources, of using more than one byte per character began to diminish, programming languages and operating systems added native support for Unicode alongside their system of code pages. Windows NT was quite an early adopter of Unicode. However Unicode support in Windows 9x required linking with a special compatibility layer or restricting your design to a very small subset of the Windows API discouraging its use. As Unicode-enabled operating systems became more widespread, ISO 8859 and other legacy encodings became less popular. While remnants of ISO 8859 and single-byte character models remain entrenched in many operating systems, programming languages, data storage systems, networking applications, display hardware, and end-user application software, most modern computing applications use Unicode internally, and rely on conversion tables to map to and from other encodings, when necessary.

Development status

The ISO/IEC 8859 standard was maintained by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 2, Working Group 3 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3). In June 2004, WG 3 disbanded, and maintenance duties were transferred to SC 2. The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining working group, WG 2, is concentrating on development of ISO/IEC 10646.

References

• Published versions of each part of ISO/IEC 8859 are available, for a fee, from the ISO catalogue site and from the ANSI eStandards Store.
• PDF versions of the final drafts of some parts of ISO/IEC 8859 as submitted for review & publication by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 are available at the WG 3 web site:
• ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1 (draft dated February 12 1998, published April 15 1998)
• ISO/IEC 8859-4:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4 (draft dated February 12 1998, published July 1 1998)
• ISO/IEC 8859-7:1999 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet (draft dated June 10 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, published October 10 2003)
• ISO/IEC 8859-10:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 10: Latin alphabet No. 6 (draft dated February 12 1998, published July 15 1998)
• ISO/IEC 8859-11:1999 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 11: Latin/Thai character set (draft dated June 22 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, published 15 December 2001)
• ISO/IEC 8859-13:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 13: Latin alphabet No. 7 (draft dated April 15 1998, published October 15 1998)
• ISO/IEC 8859-15:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 (draft dated August 1 1997; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, published March 15 1999)
• ISO/IEC 8859-16:2000 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 16: Latin alphabet No. 10 (draft dated November 15 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-16:2001, published July 15 2001)
• ECMA standards, which in intent correspond exactly to the ISO/IEC 8859 character set standards, can be found at:
• Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
• Standard ECMA-113: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet 3rd edition (December 1999)
• Standard ECMA-114: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
• Standard ECMA-118: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Greek Alphabet (December 1986)
• Standard ECMA-121: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
• Standard ECMA-128: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 5 2nd edition (December 1999)
• Standard ECMA-144: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 6 3rd edition (December 2000)
• ISO/IEC 8859-1 to Unicode mapping tables as plain text files are at the Unicode FTP site.
• Informal descriptions and code charts for most ISO 8859 standards are available in ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup (Mirror)

All content on this website, including articles, information, pictures, dictionary, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.