charactercoderingen

Character encoding refers to the process of assigning a unique numerical code to each character in a given set of characters. This allows computers to store and process text. Before character encoding, computers used proprietary methods, leading to incompatibility issues when exchanging data.

Early character encoding schemes were limited in the number of characters they could represent. For example, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) uses 7 bits to represent 128 characters, primarily English letters, numbers, and punctuation. Extended ASCII variants use 8 bits to represent 256 characters, including some accented letters and special symbols.

As computing became globalized, the need for a universal character encoding became apparent. Unicode was developed to address this, aiming to represent every character from every writing system in the world, as well as symbols and emojis. Unicode assigns a unique code point to each character.

UTF-8 is the most widely used character encoding today. It is a variable-length encoding that can represent any Unicode code point. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that a valid UTF-8 file will also be a valid ASCII file. Other Unicode encodings include UTF-16 and UTF-32, which use 16 and 32 bits per character, respectively. The choice of encoding can impact file size and compatibility between different systems and applications.