character set

character set

[′kar·ik·tər ‚set]

(communications)

A set of unique representations called characters, for example, the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the Boolean 0 and 1, the set of signals in Morse code, and the 128 characters of the USASCII.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

character set

(character)

1. A particular mapping between characters and byte strings, i.e. the combination of a particular character encoding (which maps between byte strings and integers) and a particular coded character set (which maps between integers and characters).

For example: ASCII (the ASCII coded character set, encoded directly as single-byte values), or UTF-8 (the Unicode coded character set, encoded with an 8-bit transformation method).

2. Occasionally: a character repertoire; or a coded character set.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

character set

A group of unique symbols used for display and printing. Character sets for languages that use the English alphabet generally contain 256 symbols, which is the number of combinations one byte can hold. Except for special fonts, such as Dingbats and Greek symbols, the symbols are the same for the first 128 characters. The letters may have different styling due to their typeface, but an "M," for example, is an "M" in the same sequential order in each character set.

The second 128 characters differ depending on the font/character set chosen. See ASCII chart for the actual characters in the PC-8 character set, which was defined for the original IBM PC. See extended ASCII, code page and Unicode.

Copyright © 1981-2025 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.