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Understanding Code Pages

Introduction

Everything in computers is about numbers. When you type a word, you are actually arrangeing a series of numbers. Each letter, numeral, space, punctuation mark, .. etc is called a character. And each character is represented inside the computer by its own number.

If you write a document and save it on a floppy disk, you are actually saving the series of numbers representing the characters that are in your document. Let us take the following simple document as an example:

Hello!

It consists of the word "Hello" followed by the punctuation mark "!". A total of 6 characters. Each one of them, as we said, is represented internally as a number. But what are these numbers? What is the number we use to represent a capital "H"?

To be able to save a document on one machine, then view on other machines, all these machines must use the same number representations for each character. If my machine uses the number 72 to represent the capital "H" character and another machine uses the number 72 to store the capital "T", then all occurences of the capital "H" in my document will appear as capital "T"s in that machine.

For systems to be able to correctly handle each others files, they must agree on a certain table that defines which character is represented by which numberical representation. Such a table is called a 'code page' or a 'character set'.

The Past

The Present

The Future