coded character set

coded character set

[′kōd·əd ′kar·ik·tər ‚set]

(computer science)

A set of characters together with the code assigned to each character for computer use.

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

coded character set

(character, standard)

A mapping from a set of integers to a set of characters. This mapping is generally 1:1 (i.e., bijective), for example, the code position 65 in ASCII maps only to "A", and it's the only position that maps to "A".

There are several standard coded character sets, the most widely used is ASCII, generally in its Latin-1 dialect, with Unicode becoming slowly more common; while EBCDIC and Baudot are extinct except in legacy systems.

A coded character set may include letters, digits, punctuation, control codes, various mathematical and typographic symbols, and other characters. Each character in the set is represented by a unique character code (or "code position").

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