A character encoding provides a key to unlock (ie. crack) the code. It is a set of mappings between the bytes in the computer and the characters in the character set. Without the key, the data looks like garbage. The misleading term charset is often used to refer to what are in reality character encodings.
An encoding form maps a code point to a code unit sequence. A code unit is the way you want characters to be organized in memory, 8-bit units, 16-bit units and so on. UTF-8 uses one to four units of eight bits, and UTF-16 uses one or two units of 16 bits, to cover the entire Unicode of 21 bits maximum.
I am quite confused about the concept of character encoding. What is Unicode, GBK, etc? How does a programming language use them? Do I need to bother knowing about them? Is there a simpler or fas...
In this context, that key is called a character encoding. This article offers simple advice on which character encoding to use for your content, and how to apply it, ie. how to actually produce a document in that encoding. If you need to better understand what characters and character encodings are, see the article Character encodings for ...
A character-encoding scheme is a mapping between one or more coded character sets and a set of octet (eight-bit byte) sequences. UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO 2022, and EUC are examples of character-encoding schemes.
If the new encoding is a UTF-16 encoding, change it to UTF-8." 12.1 text/html [html5:32] "The charset parameter may be provided to definitively specify the document's character encoding, overriding any character encoding declarations in the document.
A character encoding declaration is also needed to process non-ASCII characters entered by the user in forms, in URLs generated by scripts, and so forth. This article describes how to do this for an HTML file.
Other Unicode characters map to one, three or four bytes in the UTF-8 encoding. But UTF-8 is only one of the possible ways of encoding Unicode characters. This means that a codepoint in the Unicode character set can actually be represented by different byte sequences, depending on which encoding was used.
