Character encoding is the method of changing characters right into a format that may be saved and transmitted electronically. Each character, whether or not it is a letter, quantity, or image, has a corresponding numerical worth. Character encoding schemes assign these numerical values to characters, permitting computer systems to retailer and course of textual content knowledge.
There are a number of totally different character encoding schemes, every with its personal benefits and downsides. A number of the most typical character encoding schemes embrace ASCII, Unicode, and UTF-8. ASCII (American Commonplace Code for Data Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding scheme that helps 128 characters, together with the English alphabet, numbers, and a few punctuation marks. Unicode is a 16-bit character encoding scheme that helps over 1 million characters, together with characters from all main languages. UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding scheme that’s appropriate with ASCII and Unicode.