kodtecken

Kodtecken is a Swedish term that literally means code characters. In information technology, it refers to symbols used within a code or text encoding to represent information.

In computing, kodtecken most often denotes the individual characters defined by a character encoding, or the numeric code points that identify those characters within a given encoding. Characters such as the Latin letter A have a specific code point in a particular encoding; for example, ASCII assigns 65 to 'A', while Unicode assigns U+0041.

Within this framework, there are several types of kodtecken: standard characters (letters, digits, punctuation); control characters that influence data processing or display (such as newline, carriage return, tab); and metacharacters or escape sequences used by programming languages to convey special instructions. In source code and data formats, escape sequences like \n represent a newline.

Character encoding standards have evolved from ASCII to broader encodings like Unicode to accommodate many scripts and symbols. Proper handling of kodtecken is essential for data interchange, localization, and correct rendering of text across platforms.

See also: character encoding, code point, ASCII, Unicode, control character.