ISO/IEC 8859-2 is a character encoding standard designed to support Central and Eastern European languages. It is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series, which includes various encodings for different language groups. This particular encoding includes characters necessary for languages such as Polish, Czech, and Hungarian, allowing for proper representation of their unique letters and symbols. The standard uses a single-byte encoding scheme, meaning each character is represented by one byte, allowing for a total of 256 characters. ISO/IEC 8859-2 is widely used in applications and systems that require text processing in these languages, ensuring compatibility and readability across different platforms.