(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a widely used that represents text in computers. It uses a 7- , encoding characters such as letters, numbers, and symbols. The maps each character to a unique binary code, which allows computers to understand and display text.
However, ASCII has limitations as it only supports English characters and does not accommodate various languages and special symbols present globally. To address this, was developed as a universal to represent all the characters from different languages and scripts worldwide. Unicode can encode over a million characters and covers almost all writing systems.
Character encoding refers to the method of assigning a unique numerical value to each character in a character set, allowing computers to process and represent text. It encompasses both ASCII and Unicode, as they are different ways to encode characters.
There are different encoding schemes within Unicode, including and . UTF-8 is an encoding that uses variable-length encoding, allowing it to represent every character in the Unicode standard efficiently. It uses a sequence of 8-bit (1 byte), 16-bit (2 bytes), or 24-bit (3 bytes) to encode characters, depending on their code point in Unicode. UTF-16, on the other hand, uses fixed-length 16-bit encoding for every character, which results in a more consistent memory usage.
When working with character encoding, it is important to understand the concept of binary representation. In computing, data is stored and processed in binary form, which consists of bits. A bit is the smallest unit of information and can hold a value of 0 or 1, representing the two states of electronic switches in computer hardware.
By using a character encoding scheme, such as ASCII or Unicode, characters are mapped to a binary representation using bits. This binary representation is then used by computers to store, transmit, and display text. Thus, understanding character encoding, character sets, and their binary representations is fundamental in working with textual data in computer systems.
Keywords
bit | unicode | character encoding | character set | utf-8 | ascii | utf-16 | binary representation | ascii table |
