Character Encoding

Terminology

• A character is a minimal unit of text that has semantic value.
• A character set is a collection of characters that might be used by multiple languages. Example: The Latin character set is used by English and most European languages, though the Greek character set is used only by the Greek language.
• A coded character set is a character set in which each character corresponds to a unique number.
• A code point of a coded character set is any allowed value in the character set.
• A code unit is a bit sequence used to encode each character of a repertoire within a given encoding form.

Related

• ASCII
• Unicode
• UTF-7
• UTF-8