Editing Character encoding (section)

{{Short description|Using numbers to represent text characters}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=January 2018}}
[[File:Papertape-Wikipedia-example-dark1-2000px.png|thumb|[[Punched tape]] with the word "Wikipedia" encoded in [[ASCII]]. Presence and absence of a hole represents 1 and 0, respectively; for example, W is encoded as {{code|1010111}}.]]

'''Character encoding''' is the process of assigning numbers to graphical [[character (computing)|characters]], especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers.<ref>{{cite web|title = Character Encoding Definition|date = September 24, 2010 |url= http://techterms.com/definition/characterencoding |website=The Tech Terms Dictionary}}</ref> The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as [[code point]]s and collectively comprise a code space or a [[code page]].

Early character encodings that originated with optical or electrical [[telegraphy]] and in early computers could only represent a subset of the characters used in [[written language]]s, sometimes restricted to [[Letter case|upper case letter]]s, [[Numeral system|numeral]]s and some [[punctuation]] only.  Over time, character encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as [[ASCII]], the [[ISO/IEC 8859]] encodings, various computer vendor encodings, and [[Unicode]] encodings such as [[UTF-8]] and [[UTF-16]].

The [[Popularity of text encodings|most popular character encoding]] on the [[World Wide Web]] is UTF-8, which is used in 98.2% of surveyed web sites, as of May 2024.<ref name="W3TechsWebEncoding">{{Cite web |title=Usage Survey of Character Encodings broken down by Ranking |url=https://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/character_encoding/ranking |access-date=2024-04-29 |website=W3Techs}}</ref> In [[Application software|application programs]] and [[operating system]] tasks, both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are popular options.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |title=Charset |url=https://developer.android.com/reference/java/nio/charset/Charset |access-date=2021-01-02 |website=Android Developers |quote=Android note: The Android platform default is always UTF-8.}}</ref>