Editing Code (section)

=== Character encodings ===
{{Main|Character encoding}}
Character encodings are representations of textual data. A given character encoding may be associated with a specific character set (the collection of characters which it can represent), though some character sets have multiple character encodings and vice versa. Character encodings may be broadly grouped according to the number of bytes required to represent a single character: there are single-byte encodings, [[Wide character|multibyte]] (also called wide) encodings, and [[Variable-width encoding|variable-width]] (also called variable-length) encodings. The earliest character encodings were single-byte, the best-known example of which is [[ASCII]]. ASCII remains in use today, for example in [[HTTP headers]]. However, single-byte encodings cannot model character sets with more than 256 characters. Scripts that require large character sets such as [[CJK characters|Chinese, Japanese and Korean]] must be represented with multibyte encodings. Early multibyte encodings were fixed-length, meaning that although each character was represented by more than one byte, all characters used the same number of bytes ("word length"), making them suitable for decoding with a lookup table. The final group, variable-width encodings, is a subset of multibyte encodings. These use more complex encoding and decoding logic to efficiently represent large character sets while keeping the representations of more commonly used characters shorter or maintaining backward compatibility properties. This group includes [[UTF-8]], an encoding of the [[Unicode]] character set; UTF-8 is the most common encoding of text media on the Internet.