To communicate effectively, we would need to agree on a standard way of encoding the characters. But for you 8 means I, so you would receive and decode it as IFMMP. If I sent you the message HELLO, then the numbers 8, 5, 12, 12, 15 would whiz across the wires. Let’s say my computer used the number 1 for A, 2 for B, 3 for C, etc and yours used 0 for A, 1 for B, etc. ASCIIĬomputers only deal in numbers and not letters, so it’s important that all computers agree on which numbers represent which letters. Warning: This article contains lots of numbers, including a bit of binary - best approached after your morning cup of coffee. Along the way, you’ll find out more about the history of characters, character sets, Unicode and UTF-8, and why question marks and odd accented characters sometimes show up in databases and text files. This article will follow a few of those characters more closely, as they journey from Web server to browser, and back again. By the end of the story, they will all find their own unique place in this world. But the main focus are the characters: 110,116 of them. There is conflict and resolution, and a happyish ending. It has competition and intrigue, as well as traversing oodles of countries and languages. This is a story that dates back to the earliest days of computers. This article relies heavily on numbers and aims to provide an understanding of character sets, Unicode, UTF-8 and the various problems that can arise.
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