The manner in which information is represented in computer data files. Character encoding refers specifically to the codes used to represent characters. Text encoding refers specifically to the way in which the structural information in text is encoded.

In the banking industry, encoding is the imprinting of MICR characters on cheques, deposits, or other bank documents. It also refers to the magnetized recording of data on the magnetic strip on a bank card.

The correspondence between numerical character codes and the final printable glyphs. For instance, 0x41 is the ASCII code for the letter . Under Unicode/ISO-10646 0x1200 is the encoding of he.

A set of mappings from characters (described by name) to numeric code positions (often hex numbers). ASCII is a very widespread 7-bit encoding (i.e. using code positions 0x00..0x7F). Unicode is a 16 or more bits encoding that aims at containing all other encodings. Tcl uses Unicode as pivot encoding internally, and converts from/to other encodings with the encoding command.

Encoding specifies the default character set that the Web browser uses to display Web pages. In the American version of Netscape, the default is the Latin I character set. Other available encodings include the Latin 2 character set (the default for Europe), Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

(1) Inscribing or imprinting Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) characters on checks, deposits and other documents to be processed by a MICR reader. (2) The introduction of data on a medium such as a magnetic strip on plastic cards.

An encoding is a mapping from a set of bytes onto a character set. It is what determines which byte sequence represents which character. The words "encoding" and "character set" are often used synonymously. The specification for ASCII specifies both a character set and an encoding. But CJK character sets often have multiple encodings for the character set (end multiple character sets for some encodings). In more complicated cases it is possible to have multiple glyphs associated with each character (as in arabic where most characters have at least 4 different glyphs) and the client program must pick the appropriate glyph for the character in the current context.

Refers to how a rectangle of pixel data will be sent on the wire. Every rectangle of pixel data is prefixed by a header giving the X,Y position of the rectangle on the screen, the width and height of the rectangle, and an encoding type that specifies the encoding of the pixel data.

a mapping from a given character set definition to the actual bits used to represent the data

a mapping from each abstract character or glyph to one or more octets

a mapping of bit patterns to a character set

a mapping of characters into binary values

a one-to-one correspondence between character meanings and integers

a relation from a set of possible states to binary digits

a representation of a stream of characters, possibly from multiple character sets, using a stream of bytes or words, and defines (e

a sequence of bytes

a set of characters in a given order

a way of numerically representing characters from one or more character sets

a way to map a byte (or set of bytes) into a character (or set of characters) and back

a way to represent character codes belonging to a character set as bits and bytes in computer memory

a way to store a character as a sequence of one or more numbers

a set of characters (letters, logograms, digits, punctuation, symbols, control characters, and so on) that have been mapped to numeric values (called code points) that can be used by computers. The code points are assigned to the characters in the character set by applying an encoding method. Some examples of encodings are wlatin1, wcyrillic, and shift-jis.

The character set used in a particular programming environment for the locale to which an Internet application is serving. See page encoding, character set.

The technique used for storing or expressing data. For instance, text may be stored via ASCII encoding or some form of encoding that uses compression (such as ZIP). In Web browsers, document encoding refers to the translation of incoming characters in to display fonts. For instance, you may set Netscape browsers to Japanese encoding so that information in a Japanese HTML document will be correctly displayed.

In the context of fonts and character sets, the term refers to the specific ordering (sequencing) of the components of a character set or character collection.

Encoding is the process of putting a sequence of character s (letters, numbers, punctuation, and certain symbols) into a specialized format for efficient transmission or storage. In podcasting terms, encoding often refers to the conversion of recorded audio files into MP3 for upload and distribution.

The manner in which data is stored when uncompressed (binary, ASCII, etc.), how it's packed (e.g. 4-bit pixels may be packed at a rate of two pixels per byte), and the unique set of symbols used to represent the range of data items.

The underlying part of a code page that defines: a) the coding space (the number and allowable value of code points in a code page); b) the rules for sharing the coding space between control and graphic characters; and c) the rules related to the specific options permitted in that scheme.

To format the text characters in a way that the browser can understand what they are.

A mapping of numerical codes to visible character glyphs. Examples include UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 among many others. See the section "Document encoding" for more information.

Refer Character encoding.

see: character encoding scheme

Association of human readable characters, and computers' internal numbered representation. In other words, they are the alphabets, which are different according to your country/mother tongue. E.g.: ASCII, Latin 1, corresponding to Western Europe etc. See section 6.1 What is an Encoding to know more about encodings. GhostScript GhostScript is a full PostScript interpreter running under many various systems (Unixes, MS-DOS, Mac etc.). It can be used either to view PostScript files (in general thanks to a graphic interface such as GhostView or gv ...), or to translate the PostScript in another format (for instance PCL, PDF, and many formats supported by some printers such as the Desk Jets). Thanks to GhostScript many people not owning a PostScript printer are still able to use the PostScript technology.

(1) synonym for a character encoding form. (2) synonym for a character set encoding. This usage is common, especially in cases in which distinctions between a coded character set and a character encoding form is not important (i.e. 8-bit, single-byte implementations). Someone might think of an encoding as simply a mapping between byte sequences and the abstract characters they represent, though this model is not adequate to describe some implementations, particularly CJKV standards, or Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646.

An algorithm for converting files into a series of 7-bit ASCII characters that can be transmitted over the Internet. Uuencode Unix-to-Unix encode is a popular encoding algorithm used to transfer files between different platforms such as Unix, Windows, and Macintosh. Uuencoding is especially popular for sending e-mail attachments. Another popular encoding algorithm is BinHex, which is often used for transferring Macintosh files, such as PICT graphics files.