Cyrillic Character Sets

This section describes 18 commonly used Cyrillic character sets. It covers all standardized character sets used for DOS, Internet/Unix, Macintosh, and Windows, as well as several vendor-specific character sets. If you ever need to convert e-mail or newsgroup messages, HTML files, or other Cyrillic documents between these character sets, see Character Set Converter.

Background on Cyrillic character sets

The widely used ASCII standard assigns numerical values to English letters, digits, punctuation, and other symbols so that they can be conveniently used on computers. For Cyrillic letters, there is no such single standard. Many different coding schemes, also called character sets, have been used for Cyrillic. For example, the Russian capital A is character #128 in Macintosh Cyrillic, but this same letter is character #192 in Windows Cyrillic.

To read or edit Cyrillic text created in a different character set, you must first transliterate the text to the character set you normally use. For example, if a Windows user receives a Russian e-mail message from a Macintosh user, every character #128 must be replaced with character #192 before the message will make sense. Character Set Converter can perform this type of conversion for you.

Cyrillic Character Set Charts

With the exception of Soviet KOI-7, the character sets described below all contain the normal ASCII characters at positions 32 to 126. Cyrillic characters are found in the "upper" region of the character set, at positions 128 and above. For this reason, the character charts generally show just positions 128 to 255.

Character sets are grouped according to platform, but keep in mind that this grouping is somewhat arbitrary, as many character sets are used on multiple platforms.