Why do we need encoding

This is ideal if you have large amounts of data that need to be archived. Encoded data is easy to organize, even if the original data was mostly unstructured. This could be the easiest way to archive and organize your data in an automated manner.

There are automation tools you can use to encode and archive your files as they are created. This is a solution you should explore if you need to have back-ups of your files. View Post. About Us We are here to create a faster digital world with our platforms and services. Follow Us Follow us like we follow the world! Copyright Medianova Home Contact Us. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 9 months ago. Active 4 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 15k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Most people like to work with text. However, computer storage can only work with bytes. Encoding is the process of converting text to bytes. Today, everything should simply use UTF8. Improve this answer. SLaks SLaks k gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Nobody wants steenkin' ancient DOS codepages anymore. Pithikos: That's a different form of encoding. For example:. As a content author or developer, you should nowadays always choose the UTF-8 character encoding for your content or data. This Unicode encoding is a good choice because you can use a single character encoding to handle any character you are likely to need. This greatly simplifies things. Using Unicode throughout your system also removes the need to track and convert between various character encodings.

Content authors need to find out how to declare the character encoding used for the document format they are working with. Note that just declaring a different encoding in your page won't change the bytes; you need to save the text in that encoding too. As a content author, you need to check what encoding your editor or scripts are saving text in, and how to save text in UTF It's usually the default these days.

You may also need to check that your server is serving documents with the right HTTP declarations. Developers need to ensure that the various parts of the system can communicate with each other, understand which character encodings are being used, and support all the necessary encodings and characters.

Ideally, you would use UTF-8 throughout, and be spared this trouble. This section provides a little additional information on mapping between bytes, code points and characters for those who are interested.

Feel free to just skip to the section Further reading. These character sets contain fewer than characters and map code points to byte values directly, so a code point with the value is represented by a single byte with a value of There are other ways of handling characters from a range of scripts.