1. A particular mapping between characters and byte strings, i.e. the combination of a particular character encoding (which maps between byte strings and integers) and a particular coded character set (which maps between integers and characters). For example: ASCII (the ASCII coded character set, encoded directly as single-byte values), or UTF-8 (the Unicode coded character set, encoded with an 8-bit transformation method). 2. Occasionally: a character repertoire or a {coded character set}. (1998-12-17)
