Character encoding

File Format
Name	Character encoding
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Character Encodings

See Fonts for their renditions as seen on screens and printouts.

• Adobe Standard Encoding
• ANSEL
  • MARC-8
• APL code page
• ARMSCII
• ASCII
• ATASCII (used by Atari computers)
• Baudot code
• Braille
  • Nemeth Code
  • Taylor Code
• Compucolor character set
• EBCDIC
  • CP037
  • CP285
  • CP424
  • CP500
  • CP875
  • CP1026
  • CP1047
  • CP1140
  • CP1148
  • CP1155
  • CP4971
  • CP9067
  • CP12712
  • EBCDIC 6-Bit
• GB 2312
• IBM PC code pages
• ISO 646
  • ISO 646-CA (Canada / French)
  • ISO 646-CA-2 (Canada / French)
  • ISO 646-CH (Switzerland)
  • ISO 646-CN (China / Basic Latin)
  • ISO 646-CU (Cuba / Spanish)
  • ISO 646-DE (Germany)
  • ISO 646-DK (Denmark)
  • ISO 646-FI (Finland)
  • ISO 646-FR (France)
  • ISO 646-GB (Great Britain)
  • ISO 646-HU (Hungary)
  • ISO 646-IRV (International Reference Version)
  • ISO 646-IT (Italy)
  • ISO 646-JP (Japan / Romaji)
  • ISO 646-JP OCR-B (Japan / Romaji)
  • ISO 646-KR (Korea / Latin)
  • ISO 646-MT (Malta)
  • ISO 646-NL (Netherlands)
  • ISO 646-NO (Norway)
  • ISO 646-NO-2 (Norway)
  • ISO 646-PT (Portugal)
  • ISO 646-SE (Sweden)
  • ISO 646-SE-2 (Sweden)
  • ISO 646-US (Same as ASCII)
  • ISO 646-YU (Yugoslavia)
• ISO 2022
• ISO 8859
  • ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)
  • ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2, Central/East European)
  • ISO 8859-3 (Latin-3, Esperanto, Galician, Maltese, and Turkish)
  • ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4, Scandinavian and Baltic)
  • ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic)
  • ISO 8859-6 (Arabic)
  • ISO 8859-7 (Modern Greek)
  • ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew)
  • ISO 8859-9 (Latin-5, Turkish)
  • ISO 8859-10 (Latin-6, Lappish, Nordic, and Inuit)
  • ISO 8859-11 (Thai)
  • ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7, Baltic Rim)
  • ISO 8859-14 (Celtic)
  • ISO 8859-15 (Latin-9, Latin-1 with a Euro sign)
  • ISO 8859-16 (Romanian)
• JIS
  • JIS X 0201
  • JIS X 0208
  • Shift-JIS
• KOI8
  • KOI8-CS (Czechoslovakia)
  • KOI8-R (Russia)
  • KOI8-U (Ukraine)
• Macintosh encodings
  • MacCE
  • MacCyrillic
  • MacDingbat
  • MacGreek
  • MacGujarati
  • MacGurmukhi
  • MacIceland
  • MacRoman
  • MacRomania
  • MacSymbol
  • MacThai
  • MacTurkish
  • MacUkraine
• Morse code
• MS-DOS encodings
  • MS-DOS Latin US
  • MS-DOS Greek
  • MS-DOS Baltic Rim
  • MS-DOS Latin-1
  • MS-DOS Greek 1
  • MS-DOS Latin-2
  • MS-DOS Cyrillic
  • MS-DOS Turkish
  • MS-DOS Portuguese
  • MS-DOS Icelandic
  • MS-DOS Hebrew
  • MS-DOS French Canada
  • MS-DOS Arabic
  • MS-DOS Nordic
  • MS-DOS Cyrillic CIS 1
  • MS-DOS Greek 2
• PETSCII (or PET ASCII or CBM ASCII; used by Commodore computers)
• Unicode
  • UTF-1
  • UTF-7
  • UTF-8
  • CESU-8
  • UTF-EBCDIC
  • UTF-9
  • UTF-16
  • UCS-2
  • UTF-18
  • UTF-32 (UCS-4)
  • GB18030
  • Punycode
• VISCII
• Windows encodings
  • Windows 1252 (ISO 8859-1 plus additional characters)
  • Windows 1255 (Hebrew)
  • Windows 1256 (Arabic, Farsi, Urdu)
  • Windows 1257 (Baltic Rim)
  • Windows 1258 (Vietnamese)

Format details

• Byte Order Mark
• C0 controls (ASCII control characters, 7 bit)
• C1 controls (extended control characters, 8 bit)

Character escape codes

(used to enter characters in various systems and formats)

• Alt codes (DOS/Windows)
• Backslash escapes (used in various programming and markup languages)
• HTML character references (entities and numeric values)

Tools

• Kreative Recode: software to convert character encodings

Commentary and satire

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky
• The Language Double-Take: Dealing with Bidirectional Text (or: Wait, ?tahW)
• Character encoding bugs are 𝒜wesome!
• xkcd: Encoding

Other external links

• Lots of character encoding charts
• The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874–1968
• Collection of character encodings

References

• Ken Lunde, CJKV Information Processing, O'Reilly 2008, ISBN 978-0-596-51447-1 (has lots of information on encodings and Unicode in general, not only for CJKV locales)
• IBM 3270 character set reference (1987)