November 29, 2020
In a computer, we often need to store text, so we need a way to store characters.
Characters are stored using a convention that we define in advance, saying how to convert a character into a storable data.
In computers, data can only be stored as numbers. So these conventions are telling the computer (or the program that reads the memory of the computer) how to convert numbers into characters. The conventions are called encodings.
There exists different encodings. The most common ones include:
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the most basic encoding for the English language.
UTF: Unicode Transformation Format. How do we handle other languages?