What are common character encoding schemes?

Common character encoding schemes include:

1. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange):

   • Uses 7 bits to represent characters.
   • Supports 128 characters, including English letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters.

2. UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit):

   • A variable-length encoding that can use one to four bytes for each character.
   • Backward compatible with ASCII and can represent all Unicode characters.
   • Widely used on the web and in modern applications.

3. UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format - 16-bit):

   • Uses one or two 16-bit code units to represent characters.
   • Can represent all Unicode characters and is commonly used in environments like Windows.

4. UTF-32 (Unicode Transformation Format - 32-bit):

   • Uses a fixed length of 4 bytes for each character.
   • Simplifies character handling but is less space-efficient compared to UTF-8 and UTF-16.

5. ISO-8859 Series:

   • A set of 8-bit character encodings that support various languages.
   • For example, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) supports Western European languages.

6. Windows-1252:

   • A character encoding used in Microsoft Windows that is a superset of ISO-8859-1.
   • Includes additional characters for better support of Western European languages.

These encoding schemes are used to ensure that text is represented consistently across different systems and applications.