Encoding

These days the term computer has become ubiquitous. Your smart phone is more powerful than the house sized super computers from two decades ago. Computers are no longer a thing for the geeks and tech companies. They help predict the weather, send rockets to the space, deliver food to your door, allow you to instantly share videos with thousands of people. There's no end to what computers can do. Yet, computers only truly understand 0 and 1. How is the computer able to render text such as this article on your device? The secret to it all is Character Encoding.

What is Encoding?

In 1963, the ASCII standard was published. It defined a way to convert bits of 0s and 1s to roman letters. For example, the uppercase letter A was represented using 0100 0001, the letter B was represented using 0100 0010 and so on.

Unicode

As computers became more popular, people from all across the world started using them. This led to the need for displaying characters from other languages. These could not fit into the one byte ASCII encoding so other standards were created. So, several new encoding formats were created. With this came the problem that the same byte would represent different character depending upon the encoding being used. The Unicode standard was created to solve this mess around hundreds of encoding formats. The Unicode standard contains over a hundred thousand code points, which include characters from every language.

One important thing to note is that Unicode is just a standard that defines the characters that are part of it. These characters can be in english, chinese, hindi, etc. However, Unicode does not tell you how to encode these into bytes. Formats such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 define the logic to translate the Unicode characters into bytes that computers can store & transmit.

Encoding Tools

Given below is a list of all our tools that deal with encoding