Character Encoding

This lesson covers how computers represent text using character encoding schemes. You need to understand ASCII, Extended ASCII, and Unicode (including UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32) for the OCR H446 specification.

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What is Character Encoding?

A character encoding is a system that maps characters (letters, digits, symbols) to numerical codes that a computer can store and process. Each character is assigned a unique binary number.

Without an agreed encoding scheme, two computers exchanging text data would not be able to interpret the characters correctly.

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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

ASCII was developed in the 1960s as a standard for text communication.

Feature	Detail
Bits per character	7 bits
Number of characters	2^7 = 128
Characters included	Uppercase A-Z, lowercase a-z, digits 0-9, punctuation, control characters (e.g., newline, tab)

Key ASCII Values