Talk:Character encoding

message: With the link to :Category:Character sets added, I'm wondering whether Popular character encodings should be dropped (or shortened to the really popular ones)? As of today I wasn't bold enough to go forward. Comments? Pjacobi 12:17, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say no. Categories have their uses, but the only way they can order their contents is alphabetically. I'd prefer not to abolish existing collections such as the one in this article in favour of categories. -- pne 10:55, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drop 'Popular character encodings' section? 

message: Codepage redirects to Character encoding, but Code page gives the page on vendor specific code pages. Am I the only one puzzled about this? Pjacobi 12:20, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Somebody appears to have fixed this now: Codepage redirects to Code page. -- pne 10:57, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Code page" versus "Codepage" 

message: This article seems to be written as if the primary meaning of character encoding is "coded character set" whereas it seems to be far more often used to mean "complete process of encoding characters into a stream of code units". Plugwash 12:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  thinking of a rearrangement 

message: There is a discussion going on in Talk:Braille on the history of (binary) character encodings. This article is far better a place for the history (and the associated discussion). I Started a section on history. This should be expanded. -- Petri Krohn 00:26, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Braille 'the world's first binary character encoding'? 

message: According to the definition given in this article, I Ching and geomantic figures aren't character encodings. They don't represent a sequence of characters, but symbolize crucial philosophical concepts; they don't aim to facilitate computer storage or telecommunication, but divination. According to that latter argument, Braille isn't a character encoding either (it's just a plain code). Therefore, I'm intending to remove the new history section. ― j. 'mach' wust | ✑ 19:47, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Are I Ching, geomantic figures and Braille "character encodings"?

message: Where's information about the usage of Unicode in Wiki articles?
Simon de Danser 14:08, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usage 

message: I just added ISO-8859-16 to the list of ISO character sets but it was reverted by the anti-vandal bot. How stupid... Maybe someone will know why it was classified as vandalism and how to add it. 01:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  ISO-8859-16 

message: Some mention should be made of the BOM (byte order mark) in files with various encodings. The BOM is described here. SharkD (talk) 02:07, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Byte order mark

message: If I understand well the article (bravo for the clear explaination of meaningful distinctions in section "unicode..."), a programming language adds a level of encoding on top of the whole mess: how characters are internally encoded meaning what is actually a character/string object inside?
This will indeed affect how they are manipulated, how easily a given operation is performed, both for the language itself and for the programmar if the interface is not transparent (a dream in python, even python 3).
We could call this a PL-specific "character (or text) format" to avoid ambiguity with the previous 4 concepts: character~grapheme, ordinal ("code point" in unicode), code unit(s) (abstract byte or word values), (concrete) bytestring.
I guess in python by default the representation is close if not equal to utf8. But people told me one can build python with an alternate string format, close instead to strings of unicode ordinals, I guess in fact it is similar or equal to utf32/UCS4. I also read somewhere common C implementations use 32-bit representation of chars.
Note that it's rather complicated because texts to be representated (by string data in memory at runtime) come from:
* literal strings in source code
* various forms of computations which result in strings
* user direct input
* files in local file system, files over all kinds of networks
* other...
How does a language, how does a programmer, guess the original encoding (concrete scheme)? A real mystery for me...
What about a section on this topic? Searched for info in WP, couldn't find anything. Pointers (to WP or elsewhere)?
Well, after some reflexion, I guess this would be worth a separate article, so much complicated the topic is. But it would certainly be hard to find references to point to, and avoid the content to be so-called "original research". Except maybe for some (unreadible for humans) docs & (hardly usable) tools provided by the unicode technocracy itself.
--86.205.134.247 (talk) 08:01, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You would have to read documentation for the specific language you are interested in. Most older languages (e.g. C) are encoding agnostic, as far as they are concerned strings are sequences of bytes and beyond alocating a few values and sequences from the ascii range (and therefore common to all encodings in wide use today) special meaning they don't care what the bytes mean (C did later gain support for widechar strings but i'm not sure if and how the operation of widechar constants is standardised). JAVA uses UTF-16 strings and there is an option on the compiler command line to tell it the encoding of source files. I've never used python so I can't comment on the situation there. Plugwash (talk) 01:46, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  encoding in programming language? 

message: the redirection of 'text encoding' to this article is misleading and from the point of view of a specialist in digital humanities just wrong. 'character encoding' refers to the encoding of single characters as part of some character stream. 'text encoding' on the other hand refers to encoding schemas which allow to markup specific features of a text like structural divisions, layout information, linguistic analysis etc. -> markup language Probably it would be the best to refer text encoding to markup language as long as there is no dedicated article on this topic.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.128.52.133 (talk) 10:49, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: character encoding and text encoding

message: Are "codeset", "code set", "character coding" possible synonyms?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.144.63.50 (talk) 14:57, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Other names?

message: CecilWard's recent rewrite of the lead redefined codes as being the same thing as "numbers". That's not correct. The pre-UCS/Unicode encodings generally mapped characters to bit or byte sequences. Morse Code, for example, maps them directly to electrical pulses. There are no numbers involved whatsoever. The old lead was very stable and, I believe, correct. If it is too technical or confusing to a newbie, we can work on that, but for now I'm reverting the change and am inviting discussion: what's confusing about its current form? —mjb (talk) 01:21, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a code link, and it is the right thing. I see no need to change something here; it would be better to refine the "code" article to make a better overview of various ways of encoding. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:06, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent rewrite of intro 

message: There's a pair of tags proposing merger of the article Special characters to this article. This would be a place to discuss this merge.--Wtshymanski (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed merge from [[Special characters]]

message: * oppose No reason given for merge. No reason for merge. Two big scope articles, plenty in each. Code pages are also an obvious sub-topic within the broader topic of encodiing. Why on earth would we do this?  What do we gain? Andy Dingley (talk) 17:13, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge of [[Code page]] 

message: This sentence defines "code page" in terms of many code pages.  
* A "code page" usually means a byte-oriented encoding, but with regard to some suite of encodings (covering different scripts), where many characters share the same codes in most or all those code pages.
It may be just me that don't understand, but I cannot make sense of it.  It says "those code pages." What are these code pages? Does a "code page" refer to many code pages? 
In general, this paragraph should contain clear definitions that use already defined terms to define new terms. It should avoid recursive definition, unless necessary.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.89.96.228 (talk) 15:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear  section "Character sets, maps and code pages" 

message: I have paper copies of the following ECMA standards. They are 8 1/2 x 11 with blue covers. They all deal with character sets, which I was working on at the time. (See my contribution to the tilde article, which I'm very proud of.) The biggest is 24 pages. I want to get rid of them (they were very hard to get from ECMA in the 80s, which, from the little corner I saw, did not seem to be a well-run enterprise). Does anybody want them, or have a suggestion of any library/museum that I could send them to? It's all available online now, although these specific editions might not be, if anyone else is interested in character set history.
* 6, 5th edition, March 1985
*43, 2nd edition, December 1985
*113, 2nd edition, July 1988
*114, June 1986
*118, December 1986
*121, July 1987
*128, July 1988
(See List of Ecma standards for more details.)
I will pay for postage if destination is in U.S.  deisenbe (talk) 18:22, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Giving away paper copies of 7 ECMA standard character sets 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Encoding is the process of converting abstract characters (integers/Codepoints) into a sequence of bytes.
Decoding is the process of converting a sequence of bytes into abstract characters (integers/Codepoints).
So encoding is really a misnomer, because both directions matter and are defined by a so called "character encoding", not just one direction. It should really be called "character coding" to be logical.
Similarly to how video compression algorithms are called codecs (Codec is a portmanteau of coder-decoder).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.219.19.186 (talk) 05:58, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:COMMONNAME. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Concur with Andy Dingley.  Go look at the published literature on Google Books. Character encoding returns 35,000 results and character coding returns only 5,500. And about half of those 5,500 appear to be "coding" of characters in contexts completely unrelated to computers, like literary analysis.  Character encoding is by far the established term. --Coolcaesar (talk) 15:04, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Character encoding should really be called Character coding