

The problem of undefined characters is solved by Unicode encoding, which assigns a number to every character used worldwide. The standard ASCII scheme has only zero to 127 character positions 128 through 255 are undefined. A unique number is assigned to some characters. ASCII contains printable and nonprintable characters that represent uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, punctuation marks and numbers. The type of code used for converting characters is known as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), the most commonly used encoding scheme for files that contain text.

Encoding involves the use of a code to change original data into a form that can be used by an external process.
