Character Encoding¶

A character encoding gives each character in a character set its own number.

Example

In the ASCII character set, character A is represented by the number 65, B by 66, C by 67 and so on in increasing sequence. These numbers are often called 'codes' or 'character codes'. Software stores text as a sequence of these numbers.

Supported Encodings¶

IMan supports the following Unicode and other encodings:

asmo-708¶

Arabic (ASMO 708)

big5¶

Chinese Traditional (Big5)

cp866¶

Cyrillic (DOS)

cp875¶

IBM EBCDIC (Greek Modern)

dos-720¶

Arabic (DOS)

dos-862¶

Hebrew (DOS)

euc-jp¶

Japanese (JIS 0208-1990 and 0212-1990)

euc-jp¶

Japanese (EUC)

euc-kr¶

Korean (EUC)

gb2312¶

Chinese Simplified (GB2312)

ibm00858¶

OEM Multilingual Latin I

ibm037¶

IBM EBCDIC (US-Canada)

ibm437¶

OEM United States

ibm500¶

IBM EBCDIC (International)

ibm737¶

Greek (DOS)

ibm775¶

Baltic (DOS)

ibm850¶

Western European (DOS)

ibm852¶

Central European (DOS)

ibm855¶

OEM Cyrillic

ibm857¶

Turkish (DOS)

ibm860¶

Portuguese (DOS)

ibm861¶

Icelandic (DOS)

ibm863¶

French Canadian (DOS)

ibm864¶

Arabic (864)

ibm865¶

Nordic (DOS)

ibm869¶

Greek, Modern (DOS)

ibm870¶

IBM EBCDIC (Multilingual Latin-2)

iso-2022-jp¶

Japanese (JIS)

iso-2022-jp¶

Japanese (JIS-Allow 1 byte Kana - SO/SI)

iso-2022-kr¶

Korean (ISO)

iso-8859-1¶

Western European (ISO)

iso-8859-13¶

Estonian (ISO)

iso-8859-15¶

Latin 9 (ISO)

iso-8859-2¶

Central European (ISO)

iso-8859-3¶

Latin 3 (ISO)

iso-8859-4¶

Baltic (ISO)

iso-8859-5¶

Cyrillic (ISO)

iso-8859-6¶

Arabic (ISO)

iso-8859-7¶

Greek (ISO)

iso-8859-8¶

Hebrew (ISO-Visual)

iso-8859-9¶

Turkish (ISO)

koi8-r¶

Cyrillic (KOI8-R)

koi8-u¶

Cyrillic (KOI8-U)

ks_c_5601-1987¶

Korean

macintosh¶

Western European (Mac)

shift_jis¶

Japanese (Shift-JIS)

unicodefffe¶

Unicode (Big endian)

us-ascii¶

US-ASCII

utf-32¶

Unicode (UTF-32)

utf-32be¶

Unicode (UTF-32 Big endian)

utf-7¶

Unicode (UTF-7)

utf-8¶

Unicode (UTF-8)

windows-1250¶

Central European (Windows)

windows-1251¶

Cyrillic (Windows)

windows-1252¶

Western European (Windows)

windows-1253¶

Greek (Windows)

windows-1254¶

Turkish (Windows)

windows-1255¶

Hebrew (Windows)

windows-1256¶

Arabic (Windows)

windows-1257¶

Baltic (Windows)

windows-1258¶

Vietnamese (Windows)

windows-874¶

Thai (Windows)

x-mac-arabic¶

Arabic (Mac)

x-mac-ce¶

Central European (Mac)

x-mac-chinesesimp¶

Chinese Simplified (Mac)

x-mac-chinesetrad¶

Chinese Traditional (Mac)

x-mac-croatian¶

Croatian (Mac)

x-mac-cyrillic¶

Cyrillic (Mac)

x-mac-greek¶

Greek (Mac)

x-mac-hebrew¶

Hebrew (Mac)

x-mac-icelandic¶

Icelandic (Mac)

x-mac-japanese¶

Japanese (Mac)

x-mac-korean¶

Korean (Mac)

x-mac-romanian¶

Romanian (Mac)

x-mac-thai¶

Thai (Mac)

x-mac-turkish¶

Turkish (Mac)

x-mac-ukrainian¶

Ukrainian (Mac)

Byte Order Mark (Unicode Files)¶

The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character used to signal the ‘endianness’ (byte order) of a text file or stream. Its code point is U+FEFF. The BOM is optional. If present, it should appear at the start of the text stream. The BOM can also indicate which Unicode encoding the text uses.

Because Unicode can be encoded as 16-bit or 32-bit integers, a computer receiving Unicode text from arbitrary sources needs to know which byte order the integers are encoded in. The BOM lets the program that writes the text tell the program that reads it which byte order it used, without any agreement or metadata outside the text itself.