In computing, a
character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of
characters by some kind of an
encoding system. 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, etc. A character encoding is used in
computation,
data storage, and
transmission of textual
data. Terms such as
character set,
character map,
codeset or
code page are sometimes used as near synonyms; however, these terms have related but distinct meanings.