kodningen

Kodningen refers to the process of converting information from one representation to another according to a systematic scheme. The term is used across disciplines, commonly to describe text encoding, data encoding for transmission or storage, and media encoding. It is distinct from encryption, although both manipulate data.

In computing, character encoding is central: how characters from a writing system are mapped to binary data. Widely used encodings include ASCII, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), and the Unicode family. Unicode aims to represent all modern scripts and historically used characters; its common encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, with UTF-8 becoming dominant on the web due to ASCII compatibility and efficiency for multilingual text.

Data encoding for transmission and storage covers schemes such as base64, quoted-printable, and URL encoding. These encodings transform binary data into text or other safe formats for transport, storage in text files, or embedding in protocols.

Media encoding refers to encoding of audio, video, and images to reduce size while preserving quality, using standards like MP3, AAC for audio and H.264/AV1 for video, as well as lossy or lossless image codecs. Encoding also relates to compression and error-correcting concepts used in data channels.

Historically, encoding has evolved from early teleprinter codes (Baudot, ASCII) to global character sets (Unicode) and modern multimedia codecs. Interoperability depends on clear specifications and decoding compatibility.