Coded Character Sets
A coded character set (also called a character encoding, coded character repertoire, or code page) is a mapping from a set of abstract characters to a set of non-negative integers. The result is a set of encoded characters that can be represented numerically within the computer. The range of integers need not be contiguous. Examples of coded character sets include ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1), Windows Code Page 1252 (same repertoire as 8859-1), the Unicode Standard, and so forth.
The integer associated with an abstract character in a coded character set is called the code point for the character.