What is encoding? What are the differences between encodings? Examples.

Encoding is a method of representing characters as bytes for storing and transmitting text. Different encodings use different schemes for mapping characters to bytes.

Main differences between encodings:

• Character set: which characters are supported (e.g., only Latin or the entire Unicode).
• Number of bytes per character: fixed or variable.
• Compatibility with other encodings.

Examples:

• ASCII — 7-bit encoding, supports only English letters, digits, and basic symbols.
• UTF-8 — variable length (1-4 bytes), supports all Unicode characters, widely used on the internet.
• UTF-16 — 2 or 4 bytes per character, also covers the entire Unicode.
• Windows-1251 — single-byte encoding for Cyrillic, often used in Windows.

The difference is important to correctly interpret text, avoid distortions and errors during data exchange.

Example: the character 'A' in different encodings

• ASCII/UTF-8: 0x41
• Windows-1251: 0xC0

If a program expects UTF-8 but receives Windows-1251, characters will display incorrectly.