ISO-8859-2 is a character encoding standard designed to support Central and Eastern European languages. It is part of the ISO/IEC 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 accurately. The standard includes 256 characters, with the first 128 being identical to ASCII. The additional characters in ISO-8859-2 cover accented letters and special symbols used in the targeted languages, making it essential for software and web applications that require multilingual support.