Codificações

Codificações, also known as encodings, are systems used to represent characters in a digital format. They are essential for converting human-readable text into a form that computers can understand and process. Each character in a text is assigned a unique numerical value, which is then represented in binary code. The most commonly used encoding is UTF-8, which supports a wide range of characters and is compatible with ASCII, the standard encoding for the English language.

Other popular encodings include ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), which supports characters used in Western European languages, and Shift JIS, which is used for Japanese text. Encodings can vary significantly in terms of the number of characters they support and the number of bytes used to represent each character. For example, UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per character, while UTF-16 uses two or four bytes.

Proper encoding is crucial for avoiding errors such as mojibake, where characters are incorrectly displayed due to mismatched encodings. When working with text in different languages or from various sources, it is important to specify the encoding to ensure accurate representation and interpretation of the text. Misunderstandings or data loss can occur if the encoding is not correctly managed, highlighting the importance of understanding and applying codificações effectively.