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Representing Text

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Character Sets

Text data is made up of characters. Character sets allow us to store characters digitally by assigning each character a unique binary code.

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Character sets

  • Text data is made up of characters.
  • Each character is assigned its own character code, a unique binary value.
  • A character set is a collection of all the characters that a computer recognises, along with their binary codes.
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What's in a character set?

  • Character sets include:
    • Alphanumeric characters e.g. letters, numbers, and symbols.
    • Special characters e.g. new line.
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Examples of character sets

  • There are two main character sets in use:
    • American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
    • Unicode.

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