KOI8-RU is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian which use a Cyrillic alphabet. It is closely related to KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces ten box drawing characters with five Ukrainian and Belarusian letters Ґ, Є, І, Ї, and Ў in both upper case and lower case. It is even more closely related to KOI8-U, which does not include Ў but otherwise makes the same letter replacements. The additional letter allocations are matched by KOI8-E, except for Ґ which is added to KOI8-F.

In IBM, KOI8-RU is assigned code page/CCSID 1167.

KOI8 remains much more commonly used than ISO 8859-5, which never really caught on.[citation needed] Another common Cyrillic character encoding is Windows-1251. In the future, both may eventually give way to Unicode.

KOI8 stands for Kod obmena informatsiey, 8 bit (Russian:Код обмена информацией, 8 бит) which means "Code for Information Exchange, 8 bit".

The KOI8 character sets have the property that the Russian Cyrillic letters are in pseudo-Roman order rather than the natural Cyrillic alphabetical order as in ISO 8859-5. Although this may seem unnatural, it has the useful property that if the eighth bit is stripped, the text can still be read (or at least deciphered) in case-reversed transliteration on an ordinary ASCII terminal. For instance, "Код Обмена Информацией" in KOI8-RU becomes kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym) if the 8th bit is stripped.

Character set

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

KOI8-RU
0123456789ABCDEF
0x
1x
2xSP!"#$%&'()*+,-./
3x0123456789:;<=>?
4x@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
5xPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
6x`abcdefghijklmno
7xpqrstuvwxyz{|}~
8x─2500│2502┌250C┐2510└2514┘2518├251C┤2524┬252C┴2534┼253C▀2580▄2584█2588▌258C▐2590
9x░2591▒2592▓2593201C■25A0∙2219201D201421162122NBSP»00BB®00AE«00AB·00B7¤00A4
Ax═2550║2551╒2552ё0451є0454╔2554і0456ї0457╗2557╘2558╙2559╚255A╛255Bґ0491ў045E╞255E
Bx╟255F╠2560╡2561Ё0401Є0404╣2563І0406Ї0407╦2566╧2567╨2568╩2569╪256AҐ0490Ў040E©00A9
Cxю044Eа0430б0431ц0446д0434е0435ф0444г0433х0445и0438й0439к043Aл043Bм043Cн043Dо043E
Dxп043Fя044Fр0440с0441т0442у0443ж0436в0432ь044Cы044Bз0437ш0448э044Dщ0449ч0447ъ044A
ExЮ042EА0410Б0411Ц0426Д0414Е0415Ф0424Г0413Х0425И0418Й0419К041AЛ041BМ041CН041DО041E
FxП041FЯ042FР0420С0421Т0422У0423Ж0416В0412Ь042CЫ042BЗ0417Ш0428Э042DЩ0429Ч0427Ъ042A

Although RFC 2319 says that character 0x95 should be U+2219 (∙), it may also be U+2022 (•) to match the bullet character in Windows-1251.

Some references have a typo and incorrectly state that character 0xB4 is U+0403, rather than the correct U+0404. This typo is present in Appendix A of RFC 2319 (but the table in the main text of the RFC gives the correct mapping).

See also

External links

  • Nechayev, Valentin (2013) [2001]. . from the original on 2016-12-05.