prSRPS EN 18499:2026

Character repertoires — Unicode characters and character sequences for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe

Scope

This document determines the script characters required for names in the broad sense. Names in the broad sense are names of individuals in accordance with the specifications of the civil status law as well as names of legal entities, product names, names of countries, towns and streets, as well as titles of documents or laws. Names in the broad sense can denominate specific objects, but also virtual constructs such as product groups, patents or musical styles.
This document consists of a normative and an informative part.
The normative part of this document specifies the subset of Unicode characters and character sequences based on the Latin script that is required for the electronic processing of names, in the broad sense, by IT systems. This subset must, as a minimum, be supported by all IT systems conforming to this document in all data fields intended for names, in the broad sense.
The normative part also defines, where necessary, a mapping of the normative letters to the capital letters A to Z. For this purpose, the mapping recommendations set out in ICAO 9303, Part 3, for machine-readable travel documents have been adopted and further extended. This standard may also provide a basis for proposing the inclusion of additional characters that are not yet covered by the ICAO mapping.
The standard should consider the already existing standard DIN 91379 “Characters and defined character sequences in Unicode for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe”, which has already been bindingly stipulated in Germany for public administrations.
The legacy character sets ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-15 and Windows 1252 should also be a basis for the compilation of characters within the standard. However, a few characters may not be added due to professional evaluation.
To ensure interoperability across all implementations of the standard, it is necessary to define a normalization form (NFC) and an encoding (UTF-8) for Unicode characters.
In addition, the informative part of this document defines complementing Unicode script characters that may be required for the formation of the names of legal entities or products. In the context of Europe-wide data exchange, there is an extended requirement for Greek and Cyrillic characters. Georgian characters are also considered by this document due to the affiliation of the country with the CEN.
The normative part defines a minimum set of script characters. IT systems compliant to this document may support additional script characters. In interface agreements, however, it is necessary to finally define the respective character repertoires. In Annex C this document provides data types for professional use cases, which will only accept the respective underlying script characters. The data types help to achieve the goal, to get a conclusive list of permitted characters to implement robust algorithms and applications for personal identification and the creation of official documents and certificates.
A structured and tabular overview of all script characters with additional informative data can be found in Annex D.
A suitable mapping of script characters presented in this document to potentially still used legacy code pages is presented in Annex E.
A suitable mapping of script characters from 8-bit character sets not contained in this document to the character repertoires of this document is shown in Annex F.
This document is based on the Unicode Standard and primarily aimed at public authorities and organisations operating IT systems for the inter-authority data exchange or for the data exchange with citizens and economy. It covers in its entirety the official European languages, as well as the European minority languages.
This document contains no statements on historic characters or the treatment of running text. It does not regulate the representation of script characters (glyphs).