Unicode Explained

case be displayed each as two or more characters, which have no direct relationship

with the real character in the data. This is because consecutive octets would be inter-

preted as each indicating a character, instead of being treated according to the encoding

as a unit.

The “Character Set” Confusion

Character encodings are often called character sets, and the abbreviation charset is used

in Internet protocols to denote a character encoding. This is confusing because people

often understand “set” as “repertoire.” However, character set means a very specific

internal representation of characters, and for the same repertoire, several different

“character sets” can be used. A character set implicitly defines a repertoire, though: the

collection of characters that can be represented using the character set.

It is advisable to avoid the phrase “character set” when possible. The term character

code can be used instead when referring to a collection of characters and their code

numbers. The term character encoding is suitable when referring to a particular repre-

sentation.

For example, the word “ASCII” can mean a certain collection of characters, or that

collection along with their code numbers 0–127 as assigned in the ASCII standard, or

even more concretely, those code numbers (and hence the characters) represented using

an 8-bit byte for each character.

Working with Encodings

When you use ...