merkistökoodauksien

Merkistökoodaukset, also known as character encoding, are systems used to represent text in computers and other digital devices. They provide a mapping between characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols, and their corresponding numerical values. This numerical representation is what computers can actually process and store.

Early character encoding systems were developed for specific languages and often had limited character sets. For example, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was an early and influential standard that used 7 bits to represent 128 characters, primarily English letters, numbers, and punctuation. However, ASCII was insufficient for languages with characters beyond the basic Latin alphabet.

To address the limitations of ASCII, various extended character sets and encodings emerged. These included ISO 8859 standards, which provided 8-bit encodings for different European languages. Still, the proliferation of incompatible encodings led to problems, such as garbled text when a document was interpreted with the wrong encoding.

The most widely adopted solution today is Unicode, a universal character encoding standard. Unicode assigns a unique number, called a code point, to every character in virtually all writing systems, as well as symbols and emojis. While Unicode defines the code points, actual storage and transmission often use encoding schemes like UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. UTF-8 is particularly popular due to its backward compatibility with ASCII and its efficient use of space for most common characters. Understanding character encodings is crucial for correct text display and data interchange across different platforms and applications.