Essentially, a file in ASCII can be treated as UTF-8, and it just works! When UTF-8 was created in 1993, a lot of data was in ASCII, so by making UTF-8 compatible with it, people didn't need to transform the data before using it. UTF-8 (and Unicode) are compatible with ASCII.In many cases, it's the default encoding for many programming languages and websites for two crucial reasons: UTF-8 makes the Unicode standard usable by giving us an efficient way to transform numbers into binary code. A variety of encoding systems can achieve this feat, but we'll focus on the most common one today: UTF-8. The problem is that computers can only store and deal with binary code, so we still need to transform these numbers. If you go to, you can look up the number for any character, including emojis!įor example, "A" is 65, "Y" is 121, and 🍐 is 127824. The goal in developing Unicode was to have a unique way to transform any character or symbol in any language in the world into a unique number, nothing more. This is why we needed our second big breakthrough, Unicode and UTF-8. The program tries to interpret the characters using one encoding method, but they don't represent anything meaningful since it was created with another encoding method. Have you ever seen symbols like "?" or "Ã,ÂÂÂÂ" in your text? They’re caused by an encoding problem. If you wanted to use your computer in Russian or Japanese, you needed a different encoding standard, which would not be compatible with ASCII. The main problem with ASCII was that it didn't cover other languages. So, in ASCII, "K" is encoded as 1001011 in binary. If the division is not exact, we add 1 as a remainder: As we already know, computers only understand binary code, 1s and 0s, so these values were then encoded into binary.įor example, "K" is 75 in ASCII, so we can transform it into binary by dividing 75 by 2 and continue until we get 0. The "American" part is very relevant since it could only encode 127 characters in its first version, including the English alphabet and some basic symbols, such as "?" and " ".Ĭomputers can't really use numbers.
#Character encoding list code#
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCIIĪSCII, developed in 1963, is one of the first and most important standards, and it is still in use (we'll explain this later). We don't need to fully explore the history here, but it's essential to know two significant milestones that defined how computers can use encoding, especially with the birth of the Internet. StandardsĮncoding standards have a long history. This is why we need to agree on how we transform the characters into binary code and vice-versa we need a standard. If you sent a message to a friend, they couldn't see your real message because, for their computer, your 1s and 0s would mean something else. Imagine what would happen if each computer translated binary code into characters and vice-versa in its own way. To encode and decode characters into 1s and 0s, we need a standard way to do it so that if I send you a bunch of 1s and 0s, you will interpret them (decode them) in the same way I've encoded them.
#Character encoding list software#
It's interpreted by the software you use. Binary and charactersĪs you probably know, computers only understand binary code in 1s and 0s, so there's no such thing as a character. The only difference is that instead of dots and dashes, we have ones and zeros in a binary code. In computer encoding, computers encode and decode characters in a very similar way. Once the message reaches its destination, the receiver needs to transform it from Morse code to English. If we used Morse code to transmit a message, we'd first need to transform our message into dots and dashes (also called short and long marks), the only two signals available in this method. When it was developed, it was one of the first times in history that a message could be encoded, sent, and then decoded and understood by the receiver. Morse code is a great way to explain what encoding is about. To find out why something in the encoding might not work, we first need to understand what we mean by encoding and how it works. Everything works until it doesn't, and we get an ugly error, such as "Malformed UTF-8 characters, possibly incorrectly encoded". An introduction to encodingĮncoding is at the core of any programming language, and usually, we take it for granted. This article will help you prepare for when that happens and better understand what's going on behind the scenes. Your PHP project probably involves dealing with lots of data coming from different places, such as the database or an API, and every time you need to process it, you may run into an encoding issue.
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