Tekstikodeeringu

Tekstikodeeringu refers to the process of converting human-readable text into a format that can be processed and stored by computers. This involves assigning numerical values to characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols. Different character encoding schemes exist, each with its own way of mapping characters to numbers.

One of the earliest and simplest encoding schemes was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII uses 7 bits to represent 128 characters, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers, and common punctuation marks. Extended ASCII versions use 8 bits, allowing for an additional 128 characters, often used for accented letters or special symbols.

As the need for representing characters from a wider range of languages and scripts grew, more comprehensive encoding standards were developed. Unicode is the dominant modern standard, aiming to represent every character used in written languages worldwide. Unicode assigns a unique number, called a code point, to each character. These code points can be represented using various encoding forms, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32.

UTF-8 is particularly popular because it is backward compatible with ASCII and uses a variable number of bytes to represent characters, making it efficient for storing English text while still supporting a vast array of international characters. Tekstikodeeringu is fundamental to all digital communication and data processing, ensuring that text can be accurately transmitted, stored, and displayed across different systems and applications. Choosing the correct encoding is crucial to avoid errors like mojibake, where characters are displayed incorrectly due to mismatched encoding.