Two different standards, Windows and ISO, both include encodings for Central European. Įven between encodings for the same languages, differences exist. The result was that every language had a different way of displaying the same file.įor example, the same combination of numbers in Windows-1250, an encoding for Central European languages, displays, while Windows-1252, a Western European encoding, displays. In order to display characters from their own languages, groups all over the world used the 8th bit to add an extra 128 characters, for a total of 256. ASCII only requires 7 bits, and computers at the time were capable of running 8.

This character set is called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII for short. All of these characters fit into 128 places, which conveniently only took up 7 bits. Since computers were first developed in the United States, the first character sets only included characters used in English: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and some common punctuation. Encoding is the equation that connects them.īecause binary numbers don't really mean any specific character on their own, encoding also defines what set of characters the 0's and 1's will be converted to. The binary numbers are x, and the characters that need to be displayed are y. As an analogy, think back to what you learned in algebra. How the computer does this for any given file is called the encoding. But since most normal humans can't read in binary, computers take those binary numbers and convert them into characters-letters and numbers and punctuation-that make sense to people. This is called binary, and it's kind of important. In its most basic sense, encoding is the way that a computer reads and displays a file in a way that humans can understand.Įvery text file, no matter what language it is written in, is really just a big collection of 0's and 1's. Character encoding is one of the most important and least understood aspects of programming, and computers in general.

How can i find what my text encoding is