Variable-length Unicode encoding using 1–4 bytes per character. The dominant encoding of the web (98%+ of websites) with full ASCII backward compatibility.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. 7-bit encoding covering 128 characters (0–127): control characters, digits, Latin letters, and basic symbols.

Garbled text resulting from decoding bytes with the wrong encoding. Japanese term (文字化け). Example: 'café' stored as UTF-8 but read as Latin-1 → 'cafÃ©'.

What is Byte Order Mark (BOM)?

U+FEFF placed at the start of a text stream to indicate byte order and encoding. Essential for UTF-16/32, optional and discouraged for UTF-8.

Character Encoding — Unicode Glossary

Q: What is Character Encoding?

A system that maps characters to byte sequences for digital storage and transmission. Every text file has an encoding — the question is whether it is declared correctly.

What is Character Encoding?

Character encoding is the system by which abstract characters (letters, digits, symbols, ideographs) are mapped to numeric values that computers can store and process. Every piece of text in a computer — every email, web page, source code file, database record — exists as a sequence of bytes, and a character encoding is the specification that says which byte patterns correspond to which characters.

Without an agreed-upon character encoding, there is no text: only meaningless bytes. The history of character encoding is a history of different communities independently building their own mappings, the problems that caused when those systems met, and ultimately the creation of Unicode to provide a single universal system.

The Three-Layer Model

Understanding character encoding requires separating three distinct concepts that are often conflated:

1. Character repertoire (the "what"): The set of abstract characters that the system can represent. Unicode's repertoire includes all human writing systems — over 149,000 characters as of Unicode 15.1. ASCII's repertoire is 128 characters.

2. Coded character set (the "which number"): An assignment of a unique number (code point) to each character in the repertoire. In Unicode, the letter 'A' is always U+0041 regardless of how it is stored. In ASCII, 'A' is 65. These numbers are abstract — they do not specify how bytes are arranged in memory.

3. Character encoding form / transfer encoding (the "how stored"): The specification for how code point numbers are serialized into bytes. For Unicode code point U+0041, UTF-8 stores it as a single byte 0x41, UTF-16 stores it as two bytes 0x41 0x00 (LE) or 0x00 0x41 (BE), and UTF-32 stores it as four bytes 0x41 0x00 0x00 0x00 (LE).

For pre-Unicode single-byte encodings like ASCII or ISO 8859-1, the code point number and the byte value are the same, so the distinction collapses. For Unicode with multiple transfer encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32), the distinction is crucial.

Why Encoding Declaration Matters

Text has no intrinsic meaning without its encoding. The byte sequence 0x63 0x61 0x66 0xE9 could mean:

café (if decoded as ISO 8859-1 or Windows-1252)
cafÃ© or error (if decoded as UTF-8 — because 0xE9 is not a valid UTF-8 continuation byte in this position)
Different garbage in Shift-JIS or EUC-KR

This is why encoding declarations are required in HTML (<meta charset="utf-8">), HTTP headers (Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8), XML (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>), and Python source files (# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-, though Python 3 defaults to UTF-8).

Code Examples

# The same string stored differently by encoding
text = 'café'

encodings = ['ascii', 'latin-1', 'utf-8', 'utf-16-le', 'utf-32-le']
for enc in encodings:
    try:
        encoded = text.encode(enc)
        print(f'{enc:12}: {encoded.hex()} ({len(encoded)} bytes)')
    except UnicodeEncodeError as e:
        print(f'{enc:12}: ERROR — {e}')

# ascii      : ERROR — 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' (é is not ASCII)
# latin-1    : 636166e9 (4 bytes)
# utf-8      : 636166c3a9 (5 bytes — é becomes 2 bytes)
# utf-16-le  : 630065006600e900 (8 bytes — 2 bytes per char)
# utf-32-le  : 63000000650000006600000000e90000 (16 bytes)

<!-- HTML: always declare encoding in the first 1024 bytes -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">  <!-- Browser uses this to decode the rest of the page -->
  <title>My Page</title>
</head>

The Encoding Detection Problem

When encoding is not declared, software must guess. Encoding detection (charset detection) is an imperfect science:

BOM detection: Byte Order Marks are reliable when present.
Statistical analysis: Libraries like chardet analyze byte frequency distributions and multi-byte patterns to guess encodings. They work well for large samples of natural language text but can be fooled by short strings or unusual content.
Context heuristics: A file served by a Japanese web server with a Japanese domain name is likely Shift-JIS or UTF-8; a file from a Russian mail server is likely KOI8-R or Windows-1251.

The best practice is always to declare the encoding explicitly and never rely on detection.

Quick Facts

Property	Value
Synonym	Charset, codepage, text encoding
Key components	Repertoire, coded character set, encoding form
Universal standard	Unicode (with UTF-8/16/32 encoding forms)
Web default	UTF-8 (WHATWG, RFC 8259)
Python 3 default	UTF-8 for source files and I/O
Detection library	chardet, charset-normalizer (Python)

Common Pitfalls

Conflating "Unicode" with "UTF-8." Unicode is a coded character set (assigning code points to characters). UTF-8 is one encoding form for those code points. A string can be Unicode but stored as UTF-16 or UTF-32 — it is still "Unicode." Saying "encode this string as Unicode" is ambiguous; saying "encode as UTF-8" is precise.

Assuming text files have a consistent encoding. A file might be mostly UTF-8 but contain a few Windows-1252 bytes embedded by a text editor that mixed encodings. The Python errors parameter (errors='replace', errors='ignore', errors='surrogateescape') controls how to handle such mixed content.

The Python 2 vs. 3 transition. Python 2 str was bytes; Python 3 str is Unicode. The most common Python 2→3 migration bug is forgetting to handle encoding explicitly when reading files or making HTTP requests.

Character Encoding