KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bitcharacter encoding, derived from theKOI-8 encoding by the programmerAndrei Chernov in 1993 and designed to coverRussian, which uses aCyrillic alphabet. KOI8-R was based onRussian Morse code, which was created from aphonetic version of LatinMorse 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 correctKOI-7. For example, "Код Обмена Информацией" in KOI8-R becomeskOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym).

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

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 andUTF-8 is preferred to single-byte Cyrillic encodings in modern applications, Unicode contains 436Cyrillic letters including forOld Cyrillic.

The following table shows the KOI8-R encoding. Each character is shown with its equivalentUnicode code point.

• KOI8-B, a derivation of KOI8-R with only the letter subset implemented
• KOI8-U, another derivative encoding which addsUkrainian characters
• KOI character encodings
• RELCOM
• Windows-1251, another common Cyrillic character encoding

• 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. Retrieved2017-01-15.
• Kostis, Kosta."koi8-r (Russian U*IX encoding, also used by RELCOM)". 1.20.Archived from the original on 2017-01-16. Retrieved2017-01-16.
• RFC 1489
• "KOI8-R (RFC 1489)".Kermit.Columbia University. Retrieved2020-06-24.
• 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. Retrieved2020-06-24.

• Universal Cyrillic decoder, an online program that may help recoveringCyrillic texts with broken KOI8-R or othercharacter encodings.
• "The Home of the KOI8-R since 1995". 1995. Retrieved2016-12-05.
• Czyborra, Roman (1998-11-30) [1998-05-25]."The Cyrillic Charset Soup".Archived from the original on 2016-12-03. Retrieved2016-12-03.
• Hohlov, Yu. E."Cyrillic Information Representation in Electronic Form - Character Set (Code Page) Tables".Archived from the original on 2016-12-05. Retrieved2016-12-05.
• Nechayev, Valentin (2013) [2001]."Review of 8-bit Cyrillic encodings universe".Archived from the original on 2016-12-05. Retrieved2016-12-05.

• Character sets
• Computing in the Soviet Union

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Russian-language text
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from April 2023