ISO 8859-2 is a character encoding standard designed to support Central and Eastern European languages. It is part of the ISO 8859 series and includes characters necessary for languages such as Polish, Czech, and Hungarian. This encoding allows computers to represent and manipulate text in these languages effectively. The standard includes 256 characters, with the first 128 being identical to ASCII. The additional characters cover accented letters and special symbols used in the targeted languages. ISO 8859-2 is widely used in various applications, including web pages and email, to ensure proper text display and communication.