Question 1

What is text encoding?

Accepted Answer

Text encoding maps characters to numbers. ASCII: 128 characters (English). UTF-8: variable 1-4 bytes, backward-compatible with ASCII, handles all languages. UTF-16: 2-4 bytes, used by Windows/Java.

Question 2

Why do I see garbled text or strange characters?

Accepted Answer

Encoding mismatch: file saved in one encoding but read in another. Common culprits: UTF-8 vs Latin-1/ISO-8859-1, or wrong code page. Solution: ensure consistent encoding throughout.

Question 3

What character encoding should I use?

Accepted Answer

UTF-8 is the modern standard - it handles all characters and is backward-compatible with ASCII. Use it unless you have specific legacy requirements.

Question 4

Will encoding/decoding change my data?

Accepted Answer

Proper encoding is reversible. However, using wrong encoding can corrupt special characters. Always use the same encoding for encode and decode.

Text Encoding Converter - UTF-8, ASCII, Unicode

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