character set

A group of unique symbols used for display and printing. Character sets for languages that use the English alphabet generally contain 256 symbols, which is the number of combinations one byte can hold. Except for special fonts, such as Dingbats and Greek symbols, the symbols are the same for the first 128 characters. The letters may have different styling due to their typeface, but an "M," for example, is an "M" in the same sequential order in each character set.

The second 128 characters differ depending on the font/character set chosen. See ASCII chart for the actual characters in the PC-8 character set, which was defined for the original IBM PC. See extended ASCII, code page and Unicode.

---

(character)

character set - 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.