What is a Character set or Code Page?
A character set is just an agreement on what numeric value a symbol has. A computer does not know ‘A’ or ‘B ‘, it only knows the (binary) numeric value for that symbol, defined in the character set used by its Operating System (OS) or in hardware (firmware) for terminals. A computer can only manipulate numbers, which is why there is a need for character sets. An example is ‘ASCII’, an old 7 bit character set, ‘ROMAN8’ a 8 bit character set on UNIX or ‘UTF8’ a multibyte character set. A code page is the name for the Windows/DOS encoding schemes, for Oracle NLS you can consider it the same as a character set. You also have to distinguish between a FONT and a character set/codepage. A font is used by the OS to convert a numeric value into a graphical ‘print’ on screen. The Wingdings Font on Windows is the best example of a font where an ‘A’ is NOT shown as an ‘A’ on screen, but for the OS the numeric value represents an ‘A‘. So you don’t SEE it as an ‘A’, but for Windows it’s an ‘A’ and w
