Character encoding

A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a set of characters (representations of graphemes or grapheme-like units, such as might appear in an alphabet or syllabary for the communication of a natural language) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the transmission of text through telecommunication networks. Common examples include Morse code, which encodes letters of the Latin alphabet as series of long and short depressions of a telegraph key; and ASCII, which encodes letters, numerals, and other symbols, both as integers and as 7-bit binary versions of those integers.

Popular character encodings

• ISO 646
• ASCII
• EBCDIC
• ISO 8859:
• ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5, ISO 8859-6, ISO 8859-7, ISO 8859-8, ISO 8859-9, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-11, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16
• DOS character sets:
• CP437, CP737, CP850, CP852, CP855, CP857, CP858, CP860, CP861, CP863, CP865, CP866, CP869
• Windows character sets:
• Windows-1250
• Windows-1251 for Cyrillic alphabets
• Windows-1252
• Windows-1253
• Windows-1254
• Windows-1255 for Hebrew
• Windows-1256 for Arabic
• Windows-1257
• Windows-1258 for Vietnamese
• KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI7
• ISCII
• VISCII
• Big5
• HKSCS
• Guobiao
• GB2312
• GB18030
• ISO 2022, Shift-JIS, EUC
• Unicode (and subsets thereof, such as the 16-bit 'Basic Multilingual Plane'). See UTF-8