February 27, 2009

Oracle characterset and characterset encoding

The term character set indicates the set of characters used by a particular encoding system. It does not represent the numeric assignments of the characters nor the order of the characters but just the set of characters under an encoding system.

The term character set encoding refers how each character of a character set is represented under an encoding system. In order words character set encoding is the mapping of characters to binary values. It pairs the character from the character set with a natural number. Suppose, in 8-bit character set encoding each character from the character set is mapped to the values range from 0-255.

For example capital A will be encoded to 65. Every time you press A from keyboard it will be interpreted as 65. This system also named as encoding scheme.

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