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. KOI-8, on its turn, is an 8-bit extension of the KOI-7 encoding, which inherited a phonetic correspondence of Russian and Latin alphabets from the MTK-2teletype 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 для обмена и обработки информации" (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym) in KOI8-R becomes kOD DLQ OBMENA I OBRABOTKI INFORMACII.
KOI-8 stands for 8-bitnyy kod dlya obmena i obrabotki informatsii (Russian: 8-битный код для обмена и обработки информации) which means "8-Bit Code for Information Interchange".[1] In Microsoft Windows, KOI8-R is assigned the code page number 20866. In IBM, KOI8-R is assigned code page 878.[2][3] 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.
The KOI8 character sets have the property that the Cyrillic letters are in pseudo-Latin alphabetic order rather than Cyrillic alphabetical order as in ISO 8859-5. This has the useful effect that if the eighth bit is stripped and the text is presented in any character set based on ASCII including the KOI8 sets themselves, the text is reasonably human readable as a case-reversed transliteration. For instance, the "KOI" acronym "Код Обмена Информацией" becomes kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ.
Character set
The following table shows the KOI8-R encoding. Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point.
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