KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bit character encoding derived from KOI-8 encoding, created by the programmer Andrei Chernov in 1993. It was designed to encode Russian letters, using the Russian subset of a Cyrillic script. KOI-8 is an extension of KOI-7 encoding, which inherited a phonetic correspondence of Russian, as well as Latin letters, from the MTK-2 teletype code. As a result, Russian Cyrillic letters in KOI8-R are in a pseudo-Latin alphabetical order, rather than a Cyrillic one, as in ISO 8859-5. This means that if the 8th bit is stripped, the text remains partially readable in any ASCII-based encoding (including KOI8-R itself) as a case-reversed transliteration. For example, "Код для обмена и обработки информации" (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym) becomes: "kOD DLQ OBMENA I OBRABOTKI INFORMACII".

KOI-8 stands for: 8-bitnyy kod dlya obmena i obrabotki informatsii (), meaning "8-Bit Code for Information Interchange". In Microsoft Windows, KOI8-R is assigned the code page number 20866. In IBM, KOI8-R is assigned code page 878. KOI8-R also covers the Bulgarian alphabet.

It lacks proper quotation marks for both the Russian «...» and the Bulgarian „...“. Windows-1251 does support these among other, additional letters, and has thus become more popular. KOI8-R is used by less than 0.004% of websites, with the majority in Russia and Bulgaria. Unicode and UTF-8 are preferred to single-byte Cyrillic encodings in modern applications.

Character set

The following table shows the KOI8-R encoding. Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point.

See also

• KOI8-B, a derivation of KOI8-R with only the letter subset implemented

• KOI8-U, another derivative encoding which adds Ukrainian characters

• KOI character encodings

• RELCOM

• Windows-1251, another common Cyrillic character encoding

References

Further reading

External links

• Universal Cyrillic decoder, an online program that may help recovering Cyrillic texts with broken KOI8-R or other character encodings.