Character encoding
Character encoding in character encoding
A character encoding is the mapping that assigns a number to every character a computer can store. ASCII maps 128 characters to 0-127, ISO-8859-1 extends that to 256, and Unicode covers over 149,000 characters across 161 scripts as of version 16.0 (September 2024).
Encoding mismatches are the #1 cause of garbled text (mojibake). If a file is saved as Windows-1252 but opened as UTF-8, bytes in the 128-255 range decode to wrong characters or trigger errors. The fix is always the same: determine the original encoding, then convert or re-save. Compare encodings side-by-side with our comparison tool, or browse all supported encodings in the character sets reference.
Encoding mismatches are the #1 cause of garbled text (mojibake). If a file is saved as Windows-1252 but opened as UTF-8, bytes in the 128-255 range decode to wrong characters or trigger errors. The fix is always the same: determine the original encoding, then convert or re-save. Compare encodings side-by-side with our comparison tool, or browse all supported encodings in the character sets reference.