From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Astrip of paper, with the word "Wikipedia" encoded on it.
Given a number ofcharacters of analphabet, acharacter encoding is a function that will map each character to anumber. This number must be unique and is calledcode point. In this context, a character is the minimal unit of text that has asemantic value: In alphabets that useletters, this is usually a letter. Early systems, like the telegraph only have a part of all the letters possible. They have only uppercase letters, numbers, and a few extra characters (punctuation, spacing, newline..). Theflag alphabetships use is even more restricted.
