windows-1251 (a.k.a. code page cp1251) is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the cyrillic script such as russian, bulgarian, serbian cyrillic and other languages. it is the most widely used for encoding the bulgarian, serbian and macedonian languages. in modern applications, unicode is a preferred character set. 2.4% of all web pages use windows-1251 in july 2014.http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/character_encoding windows-1251 and koi8-r (or its ukrainian variant koi8-u) are much more commonly used than iso 8859-5. in the future, both may eventually give way to unicode. == code page layout == the following table shows windows-1251. each character is shown with its unicode equivalent and its decimal code.  {|  |-  |- ! || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || |- ! || || || || || || || || |{{chset-
Character_sets Windows_code_pages