In computing, a character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of an encoding system.[1] Depending on the abstraction level and context, corresponding code points and the resulting code space may be regarded as bit patterns, octets, natural numbers, electrical pulses, etc. A character encoding is used incomputation, data storage, and transmission of textual data. Terms such as character set, character map, codeset or code page are sometimes used as near synonyms; however, these terms have related but distinct meanings described in the article.
Referência: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page
