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What is Character Code?
Character code, also known as character encoding, is a system that assigns numeric codes to characters in order to represent and store them in a computer. It is essential for computers to interpret and display text in various languages, as different languages and character sets require different representations.
Basic Concepts of Character Codes
1. Code Point: A code point is a numerical value assigned to a specific character in a character code. It is unique for every character and serves as its identifier. Unicode, a widely used character encoding standard, assigns a unique code point to every character across different languages.
2. Character Sets: A character set is a collection of characters that can be used in a specific language or writing system. It includes alphabets, numbers, punctuation marks, symbols, and special characters. Some common character sets include ASCII, Unicode, and ISO-8859.
3. Encoding Schemes: An encoding scheme defines how characters are represented using numeric values (code points) within a character code. It specifies the rules for mapping characters to code points and the storage of these code points in computer memory. Examples of encoding schemes include UTF-8, UTF-16, and ASCII.
4. ASCII: ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding scheme widely used in the early days of computing. It uses 7 bits to represent characters and can encode a limited set of 128 characters, including basic English alphabets, numbers, and common symbols.
5. Unicode: Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that aims to include every character from every writing system. It uses a unique code point for each character, providing a consistent way to represent characters in different languages. Unicode supports over 100,000 characters and multiple encoding schemes.
6. UTF-8: UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit) is a variable-width encoding scheme that represents Unicode characters using 8-bit units. It can encode any character from the Unicode standard and is widely used on the internet. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII and can represent characters from multiple languages efficiently.
Conclusion
Character code, or character encoding, is crucial for computers to process and display text in different languages. It assigns numeric codes (code points) to characters and provides a consistent representation across different languages and character sets. Understanding the basic concepts of character codes helps in developing software applications, handling multilingual data, and ensuring proper text rendering.
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