Merkistökoodi

Merkistökoodi refers to a system used to represent characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols, as numerical values. This is essential for computers to process and display text. Early merkistökoodit were developed in the mid-20th century, with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) being one of the most influential. ASCII uses seven bits to represent 128 characters, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters.

As computing expanded globally, the need for a more comprehensive merkistökoodi that could accommodate characters from different languages became apparent. This led to the development of extended ASCII standards and eventually to Unicode. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard designed to represent all characters in all writing systems, as well as symbols and emojis. It assigns a unique number, called a code point, to each character. While Unicode defines the characters and their code points, various encoding forms, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, specify how these code points are represented as sequences of bytes. UTF-8 is currently the most widely used encoding for the web. Understanding merkistökoodi is fundamental to comprehending how text is stored, transmitted, and rendered digitally.