Zeichenformate

Zeichenformate, also known as character encoding, are systems that assign a numerical value to each character in a set of characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols. These numerical values are then represented in binary form, which computers can understand and process. Without character encoding, computers would not be able to display or manipulate text correctly.

One of the earliest and most influential character encoding schemes was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII assigns a 7-bit binary code to 128 characters, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers 0-9, punctuation marks, and control characters. While foundational, ASCII has limitations as it only covers a subset of the world's characters.

To address the limitations of ASCII and to accommodate a wider range of languages and symbols, various extensions and new encoding schemes were developed. Extended ASCII standards, like ISO 8859-1, introduced 8-bit codes to include additional characters for specific European languages. However, the proliferation of different extended ASCII codes led to compatibility issues.

Unicode emerged as a universal standard aiming to represent all characters from all writing systems, as well as symbols and emojis. Unicode assigns a unique number, called a code point, to each character. UTF-8 is the most widely used encoding format for Unicode. It is a variable-length encoding, meaning that characters are represented using a varying number of bytes. This flexibility allows UTF-8 to be backward compatible with ASCII while efficiently encoding a vast range of characters from different languages. Other UTF encodings, such as UTF-16 and UTF-32, also exist, each with different trade-offs in terms of storage space and compatibility. The choice of character encoding is crucial for ensuring that text is displayed and interpreted consistently across different systems and applications.