character set

group of characters that a particular computer can use

A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes referred to as code page) with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the transmission of text through telecommunication networks. Common examples include Morse code, which encodes letters of the Latin alphabet as series of long and short depressions of a telegraph key; and ASCII, which encodes letters, numerals, and other symbols, both as integers and as 7-bit binary versions of those integers, generally extended with an extra zero-bit to facilitate storage in 8-bit bytes (octets).
See more at Wikipedia.org...

Noun
1. an ordered list of characters that are used together in writing or printing
(hypernym) list, listing
(hyponym) ASCII character set

1. A finite set of different characters that is complete for a given purpose. (188 ) Note: A character set may or may not include punctuation marks or other symbols. 2. An ordered set of unique representations. (188 ) Note: Examples of character sets include the 26 letters of the English alphabet, Boolean characters 0 and 1, the 128 ASCII characters, and International Telegraph Alphabet 5 (ITA-5), published as CCITT Recommendation V.3 and ISO 646.

<character> 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)