Kodierungstabellen

Kodierungstabellen, also known as character encoding tables or code pages, are essential in computer science for representing text data. They are essentially lookup tables that map characters to specific numerical values, or codes. This mapping allows computers, which fundamentally work with numbers, to store, process, and display text. Different kodierungstabellen exist because there is no single universal standard for representing all characters used across various languages and symbols.

Early computing often relied on simpler tables like ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which uses 7 or 8 bits to represent English letters, numbers, and punctuation. As computing became globalized, the need for tables that could accommodate a wider range of characters, including those from other alphabets and special symbols, became apparent. This led to the development of more complex encoding schemes.

Unicode is a modern standard that aims to provide a unique number for every character, regardless of platform, program, or language. However, Unicode itself is a standard, and its actual implementation often uses encoding forms like UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. These are in essence dynamic kodierungstabellen that define how Unicode code points are represented as sequences of bytes. Understanding the specific kodierungstabelle used is crucial to avoid data corruption or misinterpretation, often referred to as mojibake, when text is transferred between systems or viewed with incorrect encodings.