CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search In computing, a character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of an encoding system. [ 1 ] Depending on the abstraction level and context, corresponding code points and the resulting code space may be regarded as bit patterns , octets , natural numbers , electrical pulses, etc. A character encoding is used in computation , data storage , and transmission of textual data . Terms such as character set , character map , codeset or code page are sometimes used as near synonyms; however, these terms have related but distinct meanings. Early character codes associated with the optical or electrical telegraph could only represent a subset of the characters used in written languages, sometimes restricted to upper case letters, numerals and some punctuation only. Th...