szövegkódolás

Szövegkódolás refers to the process of representing textual information in a digital format that a computer can understand and process. This involves assigning a unique numerical value to each character, symbol, or letter. Different encoding schemes exist, each with its own set of characters and their corresponding numerical representations.

One of the earliest and most widely used text encodings is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII uses 7 or 8 bits to represent 128 or 256 characters, respectively, including English letters, numbers, and common punctuation marks. However, ASCII's limited character set makes it insufficient for representing characters from many other languages.

To address this limitation, Unicode was developed. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that aims to include every character from every writing system in the world, as well as symbols and emojis. It assigns a unique code point to each character. Common encodings based on Unicode include UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 is particularly popular due to its backward compatibility with ASCII and its efficient use of space for common characters.

The choice of text encoding is crucial for ensuring that text is displayed correctly across different systems and applications. Incorrect encoding can lead to garbled text, known as mojibake, where characters appear as a jumble of unrelated symbols. Therefore, understanding and correctly implementing text encoding is fundamental to digital communication and data processing.