Character set

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A character set is an encoding system to let computers know how to recognize {{Glossary("Character")}} , including letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and whitespace.

In earlier times, countries developed their own character sets due to their different languages used, such as Kanji JIS codes (e.g. Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, etc.) for Japanese, Big5 for traditional Chinese, and KOI8-R for Russian. However, {{Glossary("Unicode")}}  gradually became most acceptable character set for its universal language support.

If a character set is used incorrectly (For example, Unicode for an article encoded in Big5), you may see nothing but broken characters, which are called Mojibake.

See also

• Character encoding (Wikipedia)
• Mojibake (Wikipedia)
• Related glossary terms:
  • {{Glossary("Character")}} 
  • {{Glossary("Unicode")}}