In computing, data storage, and data transmission, character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of encoding system that assigns a number to each character for digital representation. Depending on the abstraction level and context, corresponding code points and the resulting code space may be regarded as bit patterns, octets, natural numbers, electrical pulses, or anything of the like. A character encoding is used in computation, data storage, and transmission of textual data. "Character set", "character map", "codeset" and "code page" are related, but not identical, terms. Source by Wikipedia