Charset
Following is said about character sets:
ACH file formats use the ASCII Character set. In XML messages, the UNICODE character set, encoded in UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format), is the official ISO 20022 character set that must be used. However, SWIFT added a rule to restrict the set of allowed characters to Basic Latin.
Basic Latin Character Set:
| Character | Description |
| a - z | 26 small characters of the Latin alphabet |
| A – Z | 26 capital characters of the Latin alphabet |
| 0 - 9 | 10 numeric characters |
| / | solidus (slash) |
| - | hyphen |
| ? | question mark |
| ; | Colon |
| ( | open parenthesis |
| ) | close parenthesis |
| . | full stop |
| , | comma |
| ‘ | apostrophe |
| + | plus |
| space | |
| = | equal to |
| ! | exclamation mark |
| “ | quotation mark |
| % | percent |
| & | ampersand |
| * | asterisk |
| < | less than |
| > | greater than |
| ; | semi-colon |
| @ | at |
| # | pound (hash) |
| $ | dollar |
| { | open curly bracket |
| } | close curly bracket |
| CR | carriage return |
| LF | line feed |
| [ | left square bracket |
| ] | right square bracket |
| \ | back slash |
| _ | underscore |
| ^ | circumflex |
| ` | grave accent |
| | | vertical line |
| ~ | tilde |
| a set of control characters |