Windows-1251 is an 8-bit

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

, designed to cover languages that use the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking cou ...

such as

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * Som ...

, Belarusian, Bulgarian,

Serbian Cyrillic The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, updated in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, th ...

, Macedonian and other languages. On the web, it is the second most-used single-byte character encoding (or third most-used character encoding overall), and most used of the single-byte encodings supporting Cyrillic. , 0.4% of all

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

s use Windows-1251. It's by far mostly used for Russian, while a small minority of Russian websites use it, with 93.7% of Russian (.ru) websites using

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

, and the legacy 8-bit encoding is distant second. In Linux, the encoding is known as cp1251. IBM uses code page 1251 (

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular character encoding, encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UT ...

1251 and

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consi ...

extended CCSID 5347) for Windows-1251. Windows-1251 and

KOI8-R 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. KOI8-R was based on Russian Morse code, which was create ...

(or its

variant

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 ...

) are much more commonly used than

ISO 8859-5 ISO/IEC 8859-5:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 198 ...

(which is used by less than 0.0004% of websites). In contrast to

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German. It ...

and

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

, Windows-1251 is not closely related to ISO 8859-5.

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

(e.g. UTF-8) is preferred to Windows-1251 or other Cyrillic encodings in modern applications, especially on the Internet, making UTF-8 the dominant encoding for web pages. (For further discussion of Unicode's complete coverage, of 436 Cyrillic letters/code points, including for Old Cyrillic, and how single-byte character encodings, such as Windows-1251 and

, cannot provide this, see

Cyrillic script in Unicode As of Unicode version 15.0 Cyrillic script is encoded across several blocks: * CyrillicU+0400–U+04FF 256 characters * Cyrillic SupplementU+0500–U+052F 48 characters * Cyrillic Extended-AU+2DE0–U+2DFF 32 characters * Cyrillic Extended-BU ...

Character set

The following table shows Windows-1251. Each character is shown with its

equivalent and its

Alt code On personal computers with numeric keypads that use Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows, many characters that do not have a dedicated key combination on the keyboard may nevertheless be entered using the Alt code (the Alt numpad input ...

Kazakh variant

An altered version of Windows-1251 was standardised in

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental coun ...

as Kazakh standard STRK1048, and is known by the label . It differs in the rows shown below:

Amiga variant

Russian

Amiga OS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versio ...

systems used a version of code page 1251 which matches Windows-1251 for the Russian subset of the Cyrillic letters, but otherwise mostly follows

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

. This version is known as Amiga-1251, under which name it is registered with the

IANA The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...

References

External links

Windows 1251 reference chart
!-- not found in archive.org-->
IANA Charset Name RegistrationUnicode mappings of windows 1251 with "best fit"Universal Cyrillic decoder
an online program that may help recovering unreadable Cyrillic texts with broken Windows-1251 or other

s. {{character encoding Windows code pages

Character set

Kazakh variant

Amiga variant

See also

References

Further reading

External links