tekenset

Tekenset, or character set, is the collection of characters a system can represent, including letters, digits, symbols, punctuation, and control codes. It defines the repertoire and the numeric codes assigned to each character.

Distinguish repertoire vs encoding: A tekenset specifies the characters themselves (the repertoire) and their assigned code points. An encoding maps these code points to bytes for storage or transmission. For example, ASCII defines 128 characters and uses 7-bit codes; ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) extends to 8-bit; Windows-1252 is a common Western European 8-bit tekenset.

Unicode widely adopted as a universal tekenset; Unicode defines a repertoire of over 140,000 characters; encoding forms include UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32. UTF-8 is variable-length and ASCII-compatible; UTF-16 uses 16-bit code units and may require endianness mark (BOM). Encoding choice affects interoperability and software behavior across platforms.

Practical implications: Font support and rendering depend on the font having glyphs for the included characters; text processing may involve normalization and locale considerations; selecting an encoding affects data interchange and compatibility with legacy systems. Mismatches between tekenset and encoding can lead to misinterpretation of text, often referred to as mojibake. In practice, choosing a robust tekenset and encoding, such as Unicode with UTF-8, helps ensure broad compatibility and correct text handling.