Text Encoding

Text encoding is a method of representing characters in digital form. It assigns numerical codes to each character, allowing them to be stored and transmitted electronically. This encoding process is necessary because digital devices only understand binary code, i.e., 0's and 1's.

There are many text encoding formats, including ASCII, Unicode, and UTF-8.

ASCII Encoding

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was one of the first text encoding formats used in computers. It was developed in the 1960s and assigns a unique code to each character using only 7 bits. This restricts the number of characters that can be represented to 128.

For example, the letter "A" is assigned the code 65, "B" is assigned the code 66, and so on. ASCII is limited to representing English characters and basic punctuation.

Unicode Encoding

Unicode is a more modern standard for text encoding. It was introduced in 1991 and is capable of encoding characters from many different languages and character sets. It allows for over a million unique characters, unlike ASCII, which is limited to 128.

Unicode uses up to four bytes to encode each character, allowing for more complex and diverse scripts, such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic.

UTF-8

UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit) is a popular encoding format for Unicode. It uses a variable number of bytes to encode characters, making it efficient in terms of storage and transmission. ASCII characters are encoded using only one byte, while non-ASCII characters require more.

For example, the letter "A" is encoded as 01000001 in UTF-8, the Chinese character "你" is encoded as 11100110 10011000 10101001. UTF-8 is widely used on the internet for encoding web pages and email messages.

In summary, text encoding is an important aspect of digital communication, allowing digital devices to represent and understand textual data. ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8 are commonly used text encoding formats, each with their advantages and limitations.