Karaktersettning

Karaktersettning, often translated as character encoding, is a system that assigns a numerical value to a character. This allows computers to store, process, and transmit text. Without character encoding, digital devices would not be able to understand or display the characters we use in writing.

Early character encoding systems were developed to represent letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The most well-known among these is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which uses 7 or 8 bits to represent 128 or 256 characters respectively. This was sufficient for English text but proved inadequate for languages with different alphabets or characters.

To address this limitation, various extended character sets and Unicode were developed. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that aims to represent every character from every writing system in the world, including symbols and emojis. It assigns a unique number, called a code point, to each character.

Different encoding schemes, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, are used to represent these Unicode code points in binary data. UTF-8 is the most prevalent encoding on the web due to its efficiency and backward compatibility with ASCII. The choice of character encoding is crucial for ensuring that text is displayed correctly across different systems and platforms, preventing issues like mojibake where characters are misinterpreted.