What is a character encoding and why should you care?
Character Encoding for Beginner First why should you care? If you use anything other than the most basic English text, people may not be able to read the content you create unless you say what character encoding you used. For example, you may intend the text to look like this: but it may actually display like this: Not only does lack of character encoding information spoil the readability of displayed text, but it may mean that your data cannot be found by a search engine, or reliably processed by machines in a number of other ways. So what's a character encoding? Words and sentences in text are created from characters . Examples of characters include the Latin letter á or the Chinese ideograph 請 or the Devanagari character ह . Characters that are needed for a specific purpose are grouped into a character set (also called a repertoire ). (To refer to characters in an unam...