Encoding - what is it and why do we need it?

Can someone explaing me about encoding and its importance. I understand that we have various encodings and in each of them first 1开发者_如何学C27 characters are same.

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Read Joel Spolsky's excellent article on the subject.

An interesting point that was noted in the discussion of another answer (which I didn't really think the author needed to delete) is that there is a difference between a character set, which (in the other author's words - don't remember his username) defines a mapping between integers and characters (e.g. "Capital A is 65"), and an encoding, which defines how those integers are to be represented in a byte stream. Most old character sets, such as ASCII, have only one very simple encoding: each integer becomes exactly one byte. The Unicode character set, on the other hand, has many different encodings, none of which are equally simple: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32...

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Apart from the article above mentioned by Aasmund Eldhuset, I find this Tedx Talk really interesting and explanatory on the same topic.

Hope this helps!

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I think encoding is the technique to convert your message into a form that is not readable to unauthorized persons so that you can maintain your secrecy.