character, standard A mapping, generally 1:1, from a set of
integers, known as character codes or code positions, to a set of
characters that may include letters, digits, punctuation, control codes, mathematical and typographic symbols.
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.
(2009-01-06)