A string of 1s and 0s is broken down into parts of eight bit each (a byte for short). The above encoding scheme happens to be ASCII. If you can keep this in your head for 26 letters or are really fast with looking stuff up in a table, you could read bits like a book. A certain sequence of bits stands for a letter and a letter stands for a certain sequence of bits.

We need to convert a sequence of bits into something like letters, numbers and pictures using an encoding scheme, or encoding for short. To use bits to represent anything at all besides bits, we need rules. For humans, this is usually represented using 1 and 0 and I'll stick with this convention throughout this article. Since a computer works with electricity, an 'actual' bit is a blip of electricity that either is or isn't there. A bit can only have two values: yes or no, true or false, 1 or 0 or whatever else you want to call these two values. The only thing it can store and work with are bits. Getting the basics straightĮverybody is aware of this at some level, but somehow this knowledge seems to suddenly disappear in a discussion about text, so let's get it out first: A computer cannot store 'letters', 'numbers', 'pictures' or anything else. This article is aimed at developers (with a focus on PHP), but any computer user should be able to benefit from it. I hope this article can shed some more light on what exactly an encoding is and just why all your text screws up when you least need it. I hesitate to refer people to it who have trouble understanding encoding problems though since, while entertaining, it is pretty light on actual technical details. An article by Joel Spolsky entitled The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) is a nice introduction to the topic and I greatly enjoy reading it every once in a while. This article is about encodings and character sets.

And the good news first: while the topic can get messy and confusing, the basic idea is really, really simple. You don't need to understand every last detail, but you must at least know what this whole 'encoding' thing is about. Yes, even if you are just sending emails. If you are dealing with text in a computer, you need to know about encodings. What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text

Check text encoding