charsetName

A charsetName, or character set name, is a string that identifies a character encoding used to map between characters and bytes. It is used by programming languages, libraries, and data formats to encode text for storage or transmission and to decode incoming byte streams back into characters.

In practice, a charsetName is supplied to APIs to perform I/O, text processing, and data interchange. Examples include "UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1" (Latin-1), "US-ASCII", and "Windows-1252". Many environments support a variety of aliases (for example "utf8" or "latin1") that are mapped to a canonical encoding name. Names are often treated as case-insensitive and may vary in hyphenation or underscores depending on the system.

Canonicalization rules are typically defined by standards or by the IANA registry of character sets. When a provided charsetName cannot be resolved, libraries usually raise an exception or error, or fall back to a default encoding, which can lead to misinterpretation of data if not managed carefully.

UTF-8 has become the de facto standard on the Internet due to its efficiency for English text and its ability to represent all Unicode code points. Many formats and protocols (such as HTML, XML, and HTTP) specify or default to UTF-8.

Choosing and propagating the correct charsetName is essential for interoperability; mismatches between sender and receiver can cause garbling, data corruption, or security vulnerabilities in some edge cases.

Related concepts include character encodings, Unicode, the IANA registry, and byte order marks.