What is "character-encoding"

Character encoding is the act or result of representing characters (readable text) as a series of readable bytes (computer zeros and ones).

A useful reference is Joel Spolsky’s famous article, The Absolute Minimum That Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

See also

• ascii
• codepages
• encoding
• Extended-ascii
• latin1
• Unicode
• utf-8
• utf-16