What is Character Encoding?

A character encoding tells the computer how to interpret raw zeroes and ones into real characters. It usually does this by pairing numbers with characters. Words and sentences in text are created from characters and these characters are grouped into a character set. 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 encoding, because they are telling you how to encode characters into sequences of bytes.