A character encoding tells the computer how to interpret raw zeroes and ones into real characters. It usually does this by pairing numbers with characters. Words and sentences in text are created from characters and these characters are grouped into a character set. There are many different types of character encoding floating around at present, but the ones we deal most frequently with are ASCII, 8-bit encoding, and Unicode-based encoding. A character encoding tells the computer how to interpret raw zeroes and ones into real characters. It usually does this by pairing numbers with characters. Words and sentences in text are created from characters and these characters are grouped into a character set. There are many different types of character encoding floating around at present, but the ones we deal most frequently with are ASCII, 8-bit encoding, and Unicode-based encoding.