KOI8-R

KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bit character encoding, derived from the KOI-8 encoding by the programmer Andrei Chernov in 1993 and designed to cover Russian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet. KOI8-R was based on Russian Morse code, which was created from a phonetic version of Latin Morse code. As a result, Russian Cyrillic letters are in pseudo-Roman order rather than the normal Cyrillic alphabetical order. Although this may seem unnatural, if the 8th bit is stripped, the text is partially readable in ASCII and may convert to syntactically correct KOI-7. For example, "Код Обмена Информацией" in KOI8-R becomes kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym).

KOI8 stands for Kod Obmena Informatsiey, 8 bit (Russian: Код Обмена Информацией, 8 бит) which means "Code for Information Exchange, 8 bit". In Microsoft Windows, KOI8-R is assigned the code page number 20866. In IBM, KOI8-R is assigned code page 878.^[1][2] KOI8-R also happens to cover Bulgarian.

It lacks proper quotation marks for these languages: both «...» and the Bulgarian „...“. Windows-1251 does support these, as well as more letters, and has thus become more popular. KOI8-R is used by less than 0.004% of websites, mostly Russian and Bulgarian.^{[citation needed]} Unicode and UTF-8 is preferred to single-byte Cyrillic encodings in modern applications, Unicode contains 436 Cyrillic letters including for Old Cyrillic.

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

• Flohr, Guido; Kiss, Gabor; Chernov, Andrey A. (2016) [2006]. "Locale::RecodeData::KOI8_R - Conversion routines for KOI8-R". CPAN libintl-perl. 1.0. Archived from the original on 2017-01-15. Retrieved 2017-01-15.
• Kostis, Kosta. "koi8-r (Russian U*IX encoding, also used by RELCOM)". 1.20. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16. Retrieved 2017-01-16.
• RFC 1489
• "KOI8-R (RFC 1489)". Kermit. Columbia University. Retrieved 2020-06-24.
• Kornai, Andras; Birnbaum, David J.; da Cruz, Frank; Davis, Bur; Fowler, George; Paine, Richard B.; Paperno, Slava; Simonsen, Keld J.; Thobe, Glenn E.; Vulis, Dimitri; van Wingen, Johan W. (1993-03-13). "CYRILLIC ENCODING FAQ Version 1.3". 1.3. Retrieved 2020-06-24.

External links

• Universal Cyrillic decoder, an online program that may help recovering Cyrillic texts with broken KOI8-R or other character encodings.
• "The Home of the KOI8-R since 1995". 1995. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
• Czyborra, Roman (1998-11-30) [1998-05-25]. "The Cyrillic Charset Soup". Archived from the original on 2016-12-03. Retrieved 2016-12-03.
• Hohlov, Yu. E. "Cyrillic Information Representation in Electronic Form - Character Set (Code Page) Tables". Archived from the original on 2016-12-05. Retrieved 2016-12-05.
• Nechayev, Valentin (2013) [2001]. "Review of 8-bit Cyrillic encodings universe". Archived from the original on 2016-12-05. Retrieved 2016-12-05.