Character encoding
A scheme that maps textual characters to numeric code units or byte sequences for storage or transmission and maps encoded data back to characters.
The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Fourth Edition
An encoding is a scheme that maps sequences of bytes to textual characters and determines their representation.
- How it is used
- Explains how Ruby strings, source files, and file streams interpret bytes as characters.
- How deep it goes
- Defines byte-to-character mapping and demonstrates source settings, transcoding, forced labels, and stream-level differences without exploring encoding deeply.
- Examples
- Uses Ruby source comments, String#encoding, encode, encode!, force_encoding, getc, and getbyte as concrete examples.
- What you can do after
- Apply Ruby encoding methods to inspect, transcode, relabel, and read strings at character or byte boundaries.
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Grokking Relational Database Design
A character set is a defined mapping and storage scheme for representing characters and symbols in a database.
- How it is used
- Guides early database design decisions for storing multilingual text accurately and compatibly.
- How deep it goes
- Defines representation and storage rules, compares language support, and explains timing without detailing conversion procedures.
- Examples
- Uses English, Chinese, Latin1, UTF-8, and product attributes such as names, descriptions, and photo URLs.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure databases by selecting a character set early and matching it to required languages and symbols.
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Clojure: The Essential Reference
A character encoding is a scheme that maps characters to byte sequences and decodes byte sequences into characters.
- How it is used
- Controls how Clojure readers decode files and writers encode output streams.
- How deep it goes
- Defines encoding selection and matching requirements but stops short of byte-level implementation details.
- Examples
- Demonstrates uppercasing dictionary lines while reading and appending UTF-16 output.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure Clojure file processing with an explicitly selected character encoding.
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Julia as a Second Language
Character encoding is a scheme for representing textual characters as numeric code units in storage or transmission.
- How it is used
- Explains how Julia represents, inspects, and traverses multilingual text safely.
- How deep it goes
- Distinguishes code points from code units, demonstrates Julia operations, and examines part of nextind's string implementation.
- Examples
- Uses ASCII letters, Æ, an emoji, Unicode literals, and the string “Þrúðvangar” for conversion and iteration.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate character values and diagnose indexing assumptions in UTF-8 strings.
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Related concepts
- UTF-8includes · UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode encoding that represents each Unicode scalar value using one to four bytes and preserves ASCII byte representations.
- ASCIIincludes · ASCII is a 7-bit character-encoding standard that assigns numeric codes to 128 basic Latin characters, symbols, punctuation marks, digits, and control characters.
- databaseconfigures · A database is an organized collection of persistent data managed by software for storage, retrieval, querying, and modification.
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