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# Character Set and Source File Encoding

## Character Set

The syntax of Erlang tokens allows the use of the full ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)
character set. This is noticeable in the following ways:

- All the Latin-1 printable characters can be used and are shown without the
  escape backslash convention.
- Unquoted atoms and variables can use all Latin-1 letters.

| Octal     | Decimal   |       | Class                  |
| --------- | --------- | ----- | ---------------------- |
| 200 - 237 | 128 - 159 |       | Control characters     |
| 240 - 277 | 160 - 191 | \- ¿  | Punctuation characters |
| 300 - 326 | 192 - 214 | À - Ö | Uppercase letters      |
| 327       | 215       | ×     | Punctuation character  |
| 330 - 336 | 216 - 222 | Ø - Þ | Uppercase letters      |
| 337 - 366 | 223 - 246 | ß - ö | Lowercase letters      |
| 367       | 247       | ÷     | Punctuation character  |
| 370 - 377 | 248 - 255 | ø - ÿ | Lowercase letters      |

_Table: Character Classes_

The following tokens are allowed to also use Unicode characters outside of the
Latin-1 range:

- String literals. Example: `"√π"`
- Character literals. Example: `$∑`
- Comments in code.
- Quoted atoms. Example: `'μs'`
- Function names. Example: `'s_to_μs'(S) -> S * 1_000_000.`

Atoms used as module names, application names, and node names are restricted to
the Latin-1 range.

> #### Change {: .info }
>
> Support for Unicode in string literals, character literals, and comments was
> introduced in Erlang/OTP R16B. Support for Unicode in atom and function names
> was introduced in Erlang/OTP 20.

## Source File Encoding

[](){: #encoding }

The Erlang source file `encoding` is selected by a comment in one of the first
two lines of the source file. The first string that matches the regular
expression `coding\s*[:=]\s*([-a-zA-Z0-9])+` selects the encoding. If the
matching string is an invalid encoding, it is ignored. The valid encodings are
`Latin-1` and `UTF-8`, where the case of the characters can be chosen freely.

The default Erlang source file encoding if no valid `coding` comment is present
is UTF-8.

Two examples, both selecting Latin-1 as the source file encoding:

```text
%% For this file we have chosen encoding = Latin-1
```

```erlang
%% -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
```

> #### Change {: .info }
>
> The default encoding for Erlang source files was changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8
> in Erlang/OTP 17.0.