What is character encoding and why should I bother with it

I am quite confused about the concept of character encoding.

What is Unicode, GBK, etc? How does a programming language use them?

Do I need to bother knowing about them? Is there a simpler or faster way of programming without having to trouble myself with them?

Solution 1:

(Note that I'm using some of these terms loosely/colloquially for a simpler explanation that still hits the key points.)

A byte can only have 256 distinct values, being 8 bits.

Since there are character sets with more than 256 characters in the character set one cannot in general simply say that each character is a byte.

Therefore, there must be mappings that describe how to turn each character in a character set into a sequence of bytes. Some characters might be mapped to a single byte but others will have to be mapped to multiple bytes.

Those mappings are encodings, because they are telling you how to encode characters into sequences of bytes.

As for Unicode, at a very high level, Unicode is an attempt to assign a single, unique number to every character. Obviously that number has to be something wider than a byte since there are more than 256 characters :) Java uses a version of Unicode where every character is assigned a 16-bit value (and this is why Java characters are 16 bits wide and have integer values from 0 to 65535). When you get the byte representation of a Java character, you have to tell the JVM the encoding you want to use so it will know how to choose the byte sequence for the character.

Solution 2:

ASCII is fundamental

Originally 1 character was always stored as 1 byte. A byte (8 bits) has the potential to distinct 256 possible values. But in fact only the first 7 bits were used. So only 128 characters were defined. This set is known as the ASCII character set.

0x00 - 0x1F contain steering codes (e.g. CR, LF, STX, ETX, EOT, BEL, ...)
0x20 - 0x40 contain numbers and punctuation
0x41 - 0x7F contain mostly alphabetic characters
0x80 - 0xFF the 8th bit = undefined.

French, German and many other languages needed additional characters. (e.g. à, é, ç, ô, ...) which were not available in the ASCII character set. So they used the 8th bit to define their characters. This is what is known as "extended ASCII".

The problem is that the additional 1 bit has not enough capacity to cover all languages in the world. So each region has its own ASCII variant. There are many extended ASCII encodings (latin-1 being a very popular one).

Popular question: "Is ASCII a character set or is it an encoding" ? ASCII is a character set. However, in programming charset and encoding are wildly used as synonyms. If I want to refer to an encoding that only contains the ASCII characters and nothing more (the 8th bit is always 0): that's US-ASCII.

Unicode goes one step further

Unicode is a great example of a character set - not an encoding. It uses the same characters like the ASCII standard, but it extends the list with additional characters, which gives each character a codepoint in format u+xxxx. It has the ambition to contain all characters (and popular icons) used in the entire world.

UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are encodings that apply the Unicode character table. But they each have a slightly different way on how to encode them. UTF-8 will only use 1 byte when encoding an ASCII character, giving the same output as any other ASCII encoding. But for other characters, it will use the first bit to indicate that a 2nd byte will follow.

GBK is an encoding, which just like UTF-8 uses multiple bytes. The principle is pretty much the same. The first byte follows the ASCII standard, so only 7 bits are used. But just like with UTF-8, The 8th bit can be used to indicate the presence of a 2nd byte, which it then uses to encode one of 22,000 Chinese characters. The main difference, is that this does not follow the Unicode character set, by contrast it uses some Chinese character set.

Decoding data

When you encode your data, you use an encoding, but when you decode data, you will need to know what encoding was used, and use that same encoding to decode it.

Unfortunately, encodings aren't always declared or specified. It would have been ideal if all files contained a prefix to indicate what encoding their data was stored in. But still in many cases applications just have to assume or guess what encoding they should use. (e.g. they use the standard encoding of the operating system).

There still is a lack of awareness about this, as still many developers don't even know what an encoding is.

Mime types

Mime types are sometimes confused with encodings. They are a useful way for the receiver to identify what kind of data is arriving. Here is an example, of how the HTTP protocol defines it's content type using a mime type declaration.

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

And that's another great source of confusion. A mime type describes what kind of data a message contains (e.g. text/xml, image/png, ...). And in some cases it will additionally also describe how the data is encoded (i.e. charset=utf-8). 2 points of confusion:

Not all mime types declare an encoding. In some cases it is only optional or sometimes completely pointless.
The syntax charset=utf-8 adds up to the semantic confusion, because as explained earlier, UTF-8 is an encoding and not a character set. But as explained earlier, some people just use the 2 words interchangeably.

For example, in the case of text/xml it would be pointless to declare an encoding (and a charset parameter would simply be ignored). Instead, XML parsers in general will read the first line of the file, looking for the <?xml encoding=... tag. If it's there, then they will reopen the file using that encoding.

The same problem exists when sending e-mails. An e-mail can contain a html message or just plain text. Also in that case mime types are used to define the type of the content.

But in summary, a mime type isn't always sufficient to solve the problem.

Data types in programming languages

In case of Java (and many other programming languages) in addition to the dangers of encodings, there's also the complexity of casting bytes and integers to characters because their content is stored in different ranges.

a byte is stored as a signed byte (range: -128 to 127).
the char type in java is stored in 2 unsigned bytes (range: 0 - 65535)
a stream returns an integer in range -1 to 255.

If you know that your data only contains ASCII values. Then with the proper skill you can parse your data from bytes to characters or wrap them immediately in Strings.

// the -1 indicates that there is no data
int input = stream.read();
if (input == -1) throw new EOFException();

// bytes must be made positive first.
byte myByte = (byte) input;
int unsignedInteger = myByte & 0xFF;
char ascii = (char)(unsignedInteger);

Shortcuts

The shortcut in java is to use readers and writers and to specify the encoding when you instantiate them.

// wrap your stream in a reader. 
// specify the encoding
// The reader will decode the data for you
Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

As explained earlier for XML files it doesn't matter that much, because any decent DOM or JAXB marshaller will check for an encoding attribute.

Solution 3:

Character encoding is what you use to solve the problem of writing software for somebody who uses a different language than you do.

You don't know how what the characters are and how they are ordered. Therefore, you don't know what the strings in this new language will look like in binary and frankly, you don't care.

What you do have is a way of translating strings from the language you speak to the language they speak (say a translator). You now need a system that is capable of representing both languages in binary without conflicts. The encoding is that system.

It is what allows you to write software that works regardless of the way languages are represented in binary.

Solution 4:

Most computer programs must communicate with a person using some text in a natural language (a language used by humans). But computers have no fundamental means for representing text: the fundamental computer representation is a sequence of bits organized into bytes and words, with hardware support for interpreting sequences of bits as fixed width base-2 (binary) integers and floating-point real numbers. Computer programs must therefore have a scheme for representing text as sequences of bits. This is fundamentally what character encoding is. There is no inherently obvious or correct scheme for character encoding, and so there exist many possible character encodings.

However, practical character encodings have some shared characteristics.

Encoded texts are divided into a sequence of characters (graphemes).
Each of the known possible characters has an encoding. The encoding of a text consists of the sequence of the encoding of the characters of the text.
Each possible (allowed) character is assigned a unique unsigned (non negative) integer (this is sometimes called a code point). Texts are therefore encoded as a sequence of unsigned integers. Different character encodings differ in the characters they allow, and how they assign these unique integers. Most character encodings do not allow all the characters used by the many human writing systems (scripts) that do and have existed. Thus character encodings differ in which texts they can represent at all. Even character encodings that can represent the same text can represent it differently, because of their different assignment of code points.
The unsigned integer encoding a character is encoded as a sequence of bits. Character encodings differ in the number of bits they use for this encoding. When those bits are grouped into bytes (as is the case for popular encodings), character encodings can differ in endianess. Character encodings can differ in whether they are fixed width (the same number of bits for each encoded character) or variable width (using more bits for some characters).

Therefore, if a computer program receives a sequence of bytes that are meant to represent some text, the computer program must know the character encoding used for that text, if it is to do any kind of manipulation of that text (other than regarding it as an opaque value and forwarding it unchanged). The only possibilities are that the text is accompanied by additional data that indicates the encoding used or the program requires (assumes) that the text has a particular encoding.

Similarly, if a computer program must send (output) text to another program or a display device, it must either tell the destination the character encoding used or the program must use the encoding that the destination expects.

In practice, almost all problems with character encodings are caused when a destination expects text sent using one character encoding, and the text is actually sent with a different character encoding. That in turn is typically caused by the computer programmer not bearing in mind that there exist many possible character encodings, and that their program can not treat encoded text as opaque values, but must convert from an external representation on input and convert to an external representation on output.