Talk:Character encoding

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[edit] Archived discussion

[edit] Drop 'Popular character encodings' section?

With the link to Category:Character sets added, I'm wondering whether Popular character encodings should be dropped (or shortened to the really popular ones)? As of today I wasn't bold enough to go forward. Comments? Pjacobi 12:17, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'd say no. Categories have their uses, but the only way they can order their contents is alphabetically. I'd prefer not to abolish existing collections such as the one in this article in favour of categories. -- pne 10:55, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "Code page" versus "Codepage"

Codepage redirects to Character encoding, but Code page gives the page on vendor specific code pages. Am I the only one puzzled about this? Pjacobi 12:20, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Somebody appears to have fixed this now: Codepage redirects to Code page. -- pne 10:57, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)


[edit] Article and category title ambiguity

What's the difference between a "character set" and a "character encoding" and a "text encoding" ? They deal with assigning a unique integer to each character. I suspect the difference is so subtle that we might as well merge Category:Text encodings and Category:Character sets into one category. OK? --DavidCary 15:53, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The separateness of article text encoding seems of dubious value to me.
For a very detailed discussion of the terminology see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr17/
Pjacobi 21:57, 2005 Jun 18 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and merged the text encoding article's intro paragraph with this article's intro paragraph, and replaced the text encoding article with a redirect to this one. I have also nominated Category:Text encodings for deletion.
I've gone through most of the character encoding articles and have a new scheme for their categorization in mind. Category:Character sets can stay, but it will be a subcategory of a new overarching Category:Character encoding. — mjb 28 June 2005 04:32 (UTC)

I suggest separating character encoding and character sets into two articles. Character sets need not use in computers. As you may know, Chinese and Japanese are composed of characters (not words). A group of characters form a character set, for example, character sets used in primary and secondary school education. (See Kyōiku kanji, Jōyō kanji, Jinmeiyo kanji for Japanese usage, and 現代漢語常用字表, 現代漢語通用字表, 常用國字標準字體表, 次常用國字標準字體表, 常用字字形表 for Chinese usage.)

Besides, character sets do not equal to character encoding because one character set can apply several character encodings. For example, latin letters encoded in ASCII or encoded in EBCDIC; or JIS X 0208 (a Japanese Kanzi set) encoded in EUC-JP or in Shift_JIS. --Hello World! 02:57, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Unicode and the ISO and IEC have standardized terminology for such things. The "character set", as in "a set of characters", that you are talking about is officially termed a character repertoire (for which there is no need for a separate article and thus no need to disambiguate it from character encoding; at most it could just be more clearly described in the character encoding article). The term character set is acknowledged only as an overloaded, much-abused, legacy term most often referring to what they now prefer to call either a coded character set (a repertoire of characters mapped to numbers) or a character map (a repertoire of characters mapped to specific byte sequences), or occasionally a character encoding scheme (a map or method of converting a character encoding form (don't ask) to specific byte sequences. For more info, Unicode Technical Report #17 is a good reference.
Also, I asked elsewhere about how the term "character" is used in the study of written languages, as opposed to in computing, and it turns out that it's actually used to describe only certain kinds of graphemes used by certain written languages (a subset of Chinese logograms, IIRC). So your examples of other possible definitions of "character set" are in error. I think it's best to be very careful about preserving the distinction between a grapheme, the type of grapheme that is a 'character' according to scholars of written language, and the arbitrary abstraction that is a character (computing). "Character set", "character encoding" and other terms derived from the latter should be kept within the domain of computing related articles. — mjb 06:12, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Which article in English wikipedia talks about character repertoire? --Hello World! 14:47, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

It should be in this one and in the Unicode article. Clearly, there's work to be done :) — mjb 18:07, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] thinking of a rearrangement

This article seems to be written as if the primary meaning of character encoding is "coded character set" whereas it seems to be far more often used to mean "complete process of encoding characters into a stream of code units". Plugwash 12:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Braille 'the world's first binary character encoding'?

There is a discussion going on in Talk:Braille on the history of (binary) character encodings. This article is far better a place for the history (and the associated discussion). I Started a section on history. This should be expanded. -- Petri Krohn 00:26, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Are I Ching, geomantic figures and Braille "character encodings"?

According to the definition given in this article, I Ching and geomantic figures aren't character encodings. They don't represent a sequence of characters, but symbolize crucial philosophical concepts; they don't aim to facilitate computer storage or telecommunication, but divination. According to that latter argument, Braille isn't a character encoding either (it's just a plain code). Therefore, I'm intending to remove the new history section. ― j. 'mach' wust | ✑ 19:47, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Usage

Where's information about the usage of Unicode in Wiki articles?

Simon de Danser 14:08, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ISO-8859-16

I just added ISO-8859-16 to the list of ISO character sets but it was reverted by the anti-vandal bot. How stupid... Maybe someone will know why it was classified as vandalism and how to add it. 01:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Byte order mark

Some mention should be made of the BOM (byte order mark) in files with various encodings. The BOM is described here. SharkD (talk) 02:07, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] History

I'd be interested in seeing a proper history of character encodings. What came before ASCII? What was the first character encoding used on a computer?

-- TimNelson (talk) 07:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)