KOI8-U

KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.

In Microsoft Windows, KOI8-U is assigned the code page number 21866. In IBM, KOI8-U is assigned code page 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.

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 8th 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.

KOI character encodings

KOI 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 Exchange".

A particular feature of the KOI code pages is that the text remains human-readable when the leftmost bit is stripped, should it inadvertently pass through equipment or software that can only deal with 7 bit wide characters. This is due to characters being placed in a special order (128 codepoints apart from the Latin letter they look most similar to), which, however, does not correspond to the alphabetic order in any language that is written in Cyrillic and necessitates the use of lookup tables to perform sorting.

These encodings are derived from ASCII on the base of some correspondence between Latin and Cyrillic (nearly phonetical), which was already used in Russian dialect of Morse code and in MTK-2 telegraph code.

KOI8

Modern KOI code pages are 8-bit extensions of ASCII. This family of encodings is also known as KOI8, KOI 8 and KOI-8.