KOI8-U

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 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 stands for Kod Obmena Informatsiey, 8 bit (Russian: Код Обмена Информацией, 8 бит) which means "Code for Information Exchange, 8 bit".

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, "Код Обмена Информацией" in KOI8-U becomes kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ (the Russian meaning of the "KOI" acronym) if the 8th bit is stripped.