a mapping from the numbers of one or more coded character sets to sequences of one or more fixed-width code units

character encoding form plus byte serialization. There are five character encoding schemes in Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32BE, and UTF-32LE.

A rule that assigns numbers (character codes) to all characters in a character set. Encoding scheme, encoding method, and encoding also mean character encoding scheme.

A function whose domain is the set of sequences of octets, and whose range is the set of sequences of characters from a character repertoire; that is, a sequence of octets and a character encoding scheme determines a sequence of characters.

see also: internet media type in MIME Character Set Considered Harmful

The type of mapping used in defining an encoded character set. Oracle supports many character set encodings including single-byte, multiple-byte, shift-sensitive multi-byte and fixed-width character set encoding.

character encoding form with a specific byte order serialization (relevant mainly for 16- or 32-bit encoding forms).

A method of encoding characters including alphabetic characters (A-Z, uppercase and lowercase), numbers 0-9, punctuation and other marks (e.g. comma, period, space, &, *), and various "control characters" (e.g., tab, carriage return, linefeed) using binary numbers . For a computer to, for instance, print a capital A or a number 7 on the computer screen, we must have a way of telling the computer that a particular group of bits represents an A or a 7. There are standards, commonly called "character sets," that establish that a particular byte stands for an A and a different byte stands for a 7. The two most common standards for representing characters in bytes are ASCII ASCII and EBCDIC. Character Format