Character encoding

In computing, a character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of an encoding system. Depending on the abstraction level and context, corresponding code points and the resulting code space may be regarded as bit patterns, octets, natural numbers, electrical pulses, etc. A character encoding is used in computation, data storage, and transmission of textual data. Terms such as character set, character map, codeset or code page are sometimes used as near synonyms; however, these terms have related but distinct meanings.

Early character codes associated with the optical or electrical telegraph could only represent a subset of the characters used in written languages, sometimes restricted to upper case letters, numerals and some punctuation only. The low cost of digital representation of data in modern computer systems allows more elaborate character codes (such as Unicode) which represent more of the characters used in many written languages. Character encoding using internationally accepted standards permits worldwide interchange of text in electronic form.