What is ISCII Encoding?

The full form of ISCII is Indian Script Code for Information Interchange. It was established as Bureau of Indian Standards in 1991 and it is based on an earlier Indian Standard IS 10401:1982. It is a type of coding scheme for Indian languages.

It is an 8-bit standard where lower 128 characters (0-127) conform to ASCII standard and higher 128 characters (128-255) are used to encode characters from an Indian script.

ISCII encoding strategy is used in Unicode in their encoding. Generally the characters of the Indian language derive from the ancient Brahmi script. Mostly all the characters resemble closely to each other in terms of phonetics.

So, a certain number of common character sets was sufficient for covering a number of Indian languages.

ISCII Supported Languages

The ISCII supports different Indian languages. They are as follows −

• Punjabi

• Kannada

• Devanagari

• Assamese

• Tamil

• Gujarati

• Oriya

• Telugu

• Bengali

• Malayalam

Advantages of ISCII Coding Scheme

The advantages are as follows −

• ISCII supports a wide variety of Indian languages.

• It is easy to understand because the character set that is used here is very simple.

• The Indian characters resemble phonetics. So, only a common character set is sufficient for many languages.

• Transliteration is quite easy between the languages.

Disadvantages of ISCII Coding Scheme

The disadvantages are as follows −

• We need a special keyboard for typing ISCII characters, because a normal keyboard is not common for the ISCII characters.

• The Unicode standard of encoding involves the ISCII characters.

Example

Given below is the representation of ISCII coding −