Character Encoding

External

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding
• https://unicode.org/glossary/

Overview

Character encoding is the process though which characters within a text document are represented by numeric codes and ultimately translate into sequence of bits stored or sent over the wire. Depending of the character encoding used, the same text will end up with different binary representations. Common character encoding standards are ASCII, Unicode and UCS.

Concepts

Character

A character is the smallest component of written language that has semantic value. It refers to the abstract meaning and shape, rather than a specific shape (glyph), though in code tables some form of visual representation is essential for the reader’s understanding. It is also referred to as abstract character. In Unicode, it is the basic unit of encoding. Depending on the encoding scheme used, characters may be represented with different code units - the number of bits used to represent a single character.

Character Set

A collection of characters used to represent textual information, in which each character is assigned a numeric code point. Frequently abbreviated as character set, charset, or code set. The acronym CCS is also used. A character set might be used by multiple languages.

Character Code

Unicode is sometimes referred to as a character code.

Code Point

A code point, or a code position, is any of the numeric values that make up the code space.

Some character encoding schemes, such as ASCII, have a fixed relationship between any of the represented characters and the sequence of bits used to represent that character. For example, the ASCII code space consists of 2⁷ = 128 code points and each of the represented characters corresponds to a code point and to a predefined bit sequence. Extended ASCII has 2⁸ = 256 code points.

Unicode breaks the assumption that each character should always directly correspond to a particular sequence of bits. Instead, the characters are first mapped to a universal intermediate numeric representation. The numeric values characters are mapped to are called code points. Unicode allows 1,114,112 code points in the range 0x0 to 0x10FFFF. Code points could then be represented in a variety of ways and with various numbers of bits per character (code unit), depending on the context.

The concept of code point is part of the Unicode's solution to represent larger character sets, without adding more bits per character, because doing so would have constituted an unacceptable waste of storage space in case of Latin script content, which constituted the vast majority of content at that time, requiring those extra bits to be aways zeroed out in those cases.

Additionally to allowing flexibility on the number of bits the character is represented with, a second advantage provided by code points is that the same character can be represented with different graphical representations (glyphs).

Code points are normally assigned to abstract characters. An abstract character is not a graphical glyph but a unit of textual data. The distinction between a code point and the corresponding abstract character is not pronounced in Unicode, but is evident for many other encoding schemes, where numerous code pages may exist for a single code space.

In Unicode, not all code points are assigned to encoded characters. They can be of the following types: Graphic, Format, Control, Private-Use, Surrogate, Noncharacter and Reserved.

Code Unit

The code unit (or code value) is a bit sequence used to encode each character of a repertoire within a given encoding form. A characteristic of the code unit is the number of bits used to represent a unit of encoded text within a certain encoding scheme. For example, ASCII has a code unit length of 7, UTF-8 a code unit length of 8, UCS-4 a code unit length of 32, etc.

Code Space

A code space is a range of numerical values available for encoding characters. For Unicode, a range of integers from 0x0 to 0x10FFFF.

Code Page

A table of values that descries the character set used for encoding a particular set of characters.

Character Encoding Standards

ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and it is a seven-bit encoding scheme used to encode letters, numerals, symbols, and device control codes as fixed-length codes using integers. ASCII consists of 2⁷ = 128 code points in the range 0x0 to 0x7F. ASCII is specified by ISO 646 IRV.

Common ASCII Codes

Extended ASCII

Extended ASCII consists of 2⁸ = 256 code points in the range 0x0 to 0xFF.

Unicode

Unicode supports a much larger character set than ASCII. It comprises 17 x 65,536 = 1,114,112 code points in the range 0x0 to 0x10FFFF. The Unicode code space is divided into seventeen planes, of which the plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane, and 16 supplementary planes, where each plane supports 2¹⁶ = 65,536 code points.

Unicode Transformation Format (UTF)

Binary representation of a text represented in Unicode depends on the "transformation format" used. UTF stands for "Unicode Transformation Format", and the number specified after the dash in the transformation format name represents the number of bits used to represent each character.

UTF-8

Unicode uses 8-bit code units in the UTF-8 encoding form.

UTF-16

UTF-16 support a large enough character set to represent both Western and Eastern letters and symbols. Unicode uses 16-bit code units in the UTF-16 encoding form.

UTF-32

Unicode uses 32-bit code units in the UTF-32 encoding form.

Universal Character Set (UCS) ISO 10646

UCS-4

In the UCS-4 encoding, any code point is encoded as a 4-byte binary numbers. The code unit has 4 x 8 = 32 bits.