Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as "code points" and collectively comprise a "code space", a "code page", or a "character map".
While Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has been in use since 1991, HTML 4.0 from December 1997 was the first standardized version where international characters were given reasonably complete treatment. When an HTML document includes special characters outside the range of seven-bit ASCII, two goals are worth considering: the information's integrity, and universal browser display.
Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters.
ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin/Greek. It was designed to cover the modern Greek language. The original 1987 version of the standard had the same character assignments as the Greek national standard ELOT 928, published in 1986. The table in this article shows the updated 2003 version which adds three characters. Microsoft has assigned code page 28597 a.k.a. Windows-28597 to ISO-8859-7 in Windows. IBM has assigned code page 813 to ISO 8859-7. (IBM CCSID 813 is the original encoding. CCSID 4909 adds the euro sign. CCSID 9005 further adds the drachma sign and ypogegrammeni.)
A double-byte character set (DBCS) is a character encoding in which either all characters are encoded in two bytes, or merely every graphic character not representable by an accompanying single-byte character set (SBCS) is encoded in two bytes. A DBCS supports national languages that contain many unique characters or symbols. Examples of such languages include Japanese and Chinese. Korean Hangul does not contain as many characters, but KS X 1001 supports both Hangul and Hanja, and uses two bytes per character.
Shift JIS is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS X 0208 Appendix 1.
Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese (characters).
Windows code page 1253, commonly known by its IANA-registered name Windows-1253 or abbreviated as cp1253, is a Microsoft Windows code page used to write modern Greek. It is not capable of supporting the older polytonic Greek.
A CCSID is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several character encoding schemes —including UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32—but which may or may not actually be accompanied by a CCSID number to indicate that this encoding is being used.
Windows code page 936, is Microsoft's legacy (pre-Unicode) character encoding for representing simplified Chinese text on computers. It is one of the four Windows DBCSs for East Asian languages, accompanying code pages 932 (Japanese), 949 (Korean) and 950. It is a variant of the Mainland Chinese Guójiā Biāozhǔn Kuòzhǎn (GBK) encoding, and roughly corresponds to IBM code page 1386.
Code page 950 is the code page used on Microsoft Windows for Traditional Chinese. It is Microsoft's implementation of the de facto standard Big5 character encoding. The code page is not registered with IANA, and hence, it is not a standard to communicate information over the internet, although it is usually labelled simply as big5, including by Microsoft library functions.
Unified Hangul Code (UHC), or Extended Wansung, also known under Microsoft Windows as Code Page 949, is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Korean language. It is an extension of Wansung Code to include all 11172 non-partial Hangul syllables present in Johab. This corresponds to the pre-composed syllables available in Unicode 2.0 and later.
JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. Its two forms were a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form was dominant until Unicode replaced it. The full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合).
JIS X 0212 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a coded character set for encoding supplementary characters for use in Japanese. This standard is intended to supplement JIS X 0208. It is numbered 953 or 5049 as an IBM code page.
KPS 9566 is a North Korean standard specifying a character encoding for the Chosŏn'gŭl (Hangul) writing system used for the Korean language. The edition of 1997 specified an ISO 2022-compliant 94×94 two-byte coded character set. Subsequent editions have added additional encoded characters outside of the 94×94 plane, in a manner comparable to UHC or GBK.
KS X 1001, "Code for Information Interchange ", formerly called KS C 5601, is a South Korean coded character set standard to represent Hangul and Hanja characters on a computer.
Microsoft Windows code page 932, also called Windows-31J amongst other names, is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Japanese language, which is an extended variant of the Shift JIS Japanese character encoding. It contains standard 7-bit ASCII codes, and Japanese characters are indicated by the high bit of the first byte being set to 1. Some code points in this page require a second byte, so characters use either 8 or 16 bits for encoding.
Code page 942 is one of IBM's extensions of Shift JIS. The coded character sets are JIS X 0201, JIS X 0208, IBM extensions for IBM 1880 UDC and IBM extensions. It is the combination of the single-byte Code page 1041 and the double-byte Code page 301.
IBM code page 936 is a character encoding for Simplified Chinese including 1880 user-defined characters (UDC), which was superseded in 1993. It is a combination of the single-byte Code page 903 and the double-byte Code page 928. Code page 946 uses the same double-byte component, but an extended single-byte component.
Several mutually incompatible versions of the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) have been used to represent the Japanese language on computers, including variants defined by Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM and others. Some are variable-width encodings, employing locking shift codes to switch between single-byte and double-byte modes. Unlike other EBCDIC locales, the lowercase basic Latin letters are often not preserved in their usual locations.
