KOI8-U (RFC 2319) is an 8-bit
character encoding, designed to cover
Ukrainian, which uses a
Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on
KOI8-R, which covers
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
and
Bulgarian, but replaces eight box drawing characters with four Ukrainian letters
Ґ,
Є,
І, and
Ї in both upper case and lower case.
KOI8-RU is closely related, but adds Ў for
Belarusian. In both, the letter allocations match those in
KOI8-E
ISO-IR-111 or KOI8-E is an 8-bit character set. It is a multinational extension of KOI-8 for Belarusian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Ukrainian (except Ґґ which is added to KOI8-F). The name "ISO-IR-111" refers to its registration number in the IS ...
, except for Ґ which is added to
KOI8-F
KOI8-F or KOI8 Unified is an 8-bit character set. It was designed by Peter Cassetta of Fingertip Software (now defunct) as an attempt to support all the encoded letters from both KOI8-E (ISO-IR-111) and KOI8-RU (and hence also, KOI8-U and KOI8- ...
.
In
Microsoft Windows, KOI8-U is assigned the code page number 21866. In
IBM, KOI8-U is assigned code page/
CCSID
A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...
1168.
KOI8 remains much more commonly used than
ISO 8859-5, which never really caught on. Another common Cyrillic character encoding is
Windows-1251. In the future, both may eventually give way to
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
.
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, "Русский Текст" in KOI8-U becomes ''rUSSKIJ tEKST'' ("Russian Text") if the 8th bit is stripped.
Character set
The following table shows the KOI8-U encoding.
Each character is shown with its equivalent
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
code point.
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
*
KOI character encodings
KOI (''КОИ'') is a family of several code pages for the Cyrillic script.
The name stands for ''Kod obmena informatsiey'' (russian: Код обмена информацией) which means "Code for Information Interchange".
A particular feature ...
*
Ukrainian alphabet
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
External links
*
*
*
* https://web.archive.org/web/20050206230944/http://www.net.ua/KOI8-U/
{{Character encoding
Character sets