What is the most commonly used character encoding in computers?

The most commonly used character encoding in computers is Unicode. Unicode encoding uses 16-bit or 32-bit encoding and can represent more than 130,000 characters. In the past, different countries and regions used different character encodings to cause interoperability problems. Now Unicode It solves the conversion problem between different character encodings and realizes the unified representation of global characters.

#The operating environment of this article: Windows 10 system, dell g3 computer.

In computers, the most commonly used character encoding is Unicode. Unicode is a character set used to assign unique numeric identifiers to nearly all characters and symbols in the world.

Unicode encoding uses 16-bit (2 bytes) or 32-bit (4 bytes) encoding and can represent more than 130,000 characters. Among them, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) uses 16-bit encoding and covers commonly used language symbols, such as English letters, Arabic numerals, Latin letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic letters, Chinese characters, etc. The remaining characters use 32-bit encoding.

The emergence of Unicode has solved the interoperability problems caused by different countries and regions using different character encodings in the past. In the past, each country and region had its own character encoding, such as ASCII, GB2312, BIG5, etc. These encodings can only represent characters in a specific language or region, but cannot uniformly represent global characters. Therefore, in an international environment, conversion between different character encodings is a tedious and error-prone task.

In order to allow Unicode encoding to be used in computers, the Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) came into being. UTF-8 is one of the most commonly used UTF encodings. It uses a variable-length encoding scheme and can represent any character in the Unicode character set. UTF-8 uses 1-byte encoding for ASCII characters, while Chinese characters usually use 3-byte encoding. UTF-16 and UTF-32 are two other commonly used Unicode encoding formats.

Due to the popularity of Unicode, operating systems, applications and Internet standards on computers have fully supported Unicode. This means that now users will not be restricted by character encoding whether they are entering characters in a text editor, accessing web pages in a browser, or using file names in the operating system.

Summary

Unicode is the most commonly used character encoding in computers. It solves the problem of conversion between different character encodings and achieves a unified representation of global characters. With the development of the global Internet and the advancement of computer technology, the importance of Unicode will become increasingly prominent.

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