Character Sets
- Computers represent all data in binary, including characters that are input using a keyboard
- 1 binary digit (bit) would allow us to represent only two possible characters, for example 1=A and 0=B
- Using more bits allows more characters to be represented, 2 bits or 22 = 4 and so on
What is a character set?
- A character set is a defined list of characters that can be understood by a computer
- Each character is given a unique binary code
- Character sets are ordered logically, the code for ‘B’ is one more than the code for ‘A’
- A character set provides a standard for computers to communicate and send/receive information
- Without a character set, one system might interpret 01000001 differently from another
- The number of characters that can be represented is determined by the number of bits used by the character set
- Two common character sets are:
- American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
- Universal Character Encoding (UNICODE)
