meaning of character encoding

1. character encoding Or "character encoding scheme" A mapping of binary values to code positions and back; generally a 1:1 bijective mapping. In the case of ASCII, this is generally a fx=x mapping: code point 65 maps to the byte value 65, and vice versa. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i. e. , values between 0 and 255, at most. US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact. Unicode and many CJK coded character sets use many more than 255 positions, requiring more complex mappings: sometimes the characters are mapped onto pairs of bytes see DBCS. In many cases, this breaks programs that assume a one-to-one mapping of bytes to characters, and so, for example, treat any occurrance of the byte value 13 as a carriage return. To avoid this problem, character encodings such as UTF-8 were devised.

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character encoding | character encoding scheme |

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