Representing Text
Computer Science: OCR GCSE, topic 1.2.24
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.
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.
What's in a character set?
- Character sets include:
- Alphanumeric characters e.g. letters, numbers, and symbols.
- Special characters e.g. new line.
Examples of character sets
- There are two main character sets in use:
- American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
- Unicode.
Test yourself on Representing Text
What are the two main character sets?
What are alphanumeric characters?