charset

CharSet or “character set” is a fixed collection of alphanumeric symbols used in web and Internet protocols. It is important for a browser to know the character set in order to display an HTML page correctly.

The first and one of the simplest standardized character sets is “ASCII” (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). It contains 128 symbols which include all the letters, digits, punctuations you used on a PC keyboard. ASCII is designed for languages that use Latin alphabet only.

Each file has to go through encoding/decoding in order to be properly stored and displayed on a screen. The process of transformation of the character set of language’s writing system into a sequence of 1s and 0s by a computer is called Character Encoding.

There are a lot of encoding systems (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, IEC 8859 etc). UTF-8 (Unicode) which is default character encoding covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world.