ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 Coded character sets is a standardization subcommittee of the Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), that develops and facilitates standards within the field of coded character sets. The international secretariat of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 is the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC), located in Japan.

<character, standard> A mapping from a set of integers to a set of characters. This mapping is generally 1:1 (i.e., bijective), for example, the code position 65 in ASCII maps only to "A", and it's the only position that maps to "A". There are several standard coded character sets, the most widely used is ASCII, generally in its Latin-1 dialect, with Unicode becoming slowly more common; while EBCDIC and Baudot are extinct except in legacy systems. A coded character set may include letters, digits, punctuation, control codes, various mathematical and typographic symbols, and other characters. Each character in the set is represented by a unique character code (or "{code position}"). (1998-10-18)

The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), which is the basis of many character encodings, improving as characters from previously unrepresented typing systems are added.

A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32, but which may or may not actually be accompanied by a CCSID number to indicate that this encoding is being used.

Coded Character Set IDentification (Reference: IBM)

Several binary representations of 8-bit character sets for common Western European languages are compared in this article. These encodings were designed for representation of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols (including some Greek letters).

<character> (Or "character encoding scheme") A mapping of binary values to code positions and back; generally a 1:1 (bijective) mapping. In the case of ASCII, this is generally a f(x)=x mapping: code point 65 maps to the byte value 65, and vice versa. This is possible because ASCII uses only code positions representable as single bytes, i.e., values between 0 and 255, at most. (US-ASCII only uses values 0 to 127, in fact.) Unicode and many CJK coded character sets use many more than 255 positions, requiring more complex mappings: sometimes the characters are mapped onto pairs of bytes (see DBCS). In many cases, this breaks programs that assume a one-to-one mapping of bytes to characters, and so, for example, treat any occurrance of the byte value 13 as a carriage return. To avoid this problem, character encodings such as UTF-8 were devised. (1998-10-18)

<character> 1. A particular mapping between characters and byte strings, i.e. the combination of a particular character encoding (which maps between byte strings and integers) and a particular coded character set (which maps between integers and characters). For example: ASCII (the ASCII coded character set, encoded directly as single-byte values), or UTF-8 (the Unicode coded character set, encoded with an 8-bit transformation method). 2. Occasionally: a character repertoire; or a {coded character set}. (1998-12-17)

Character Data Representation Architecture

Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers.Definition from The Tech Terms Dictionary The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as "code points" and collectively comprise a "code space", a "code page", or a "character map".