Character encoding is the way that a computer interprets and
then displays a file as text. Each encoding has its own set of
characters that it can match to the file. For example, the
Windows-1252 encoding, used for Western European languages,
contains characters like accented vowels that are used in Spanish,
French, etc. However, an encoding used for Russian family languages
would include characters from the Cyrillic alphabet.
Most encodings use 8 bits to encode a single character, which
allows the encoding to contain up to 256 characters.
Unicode is a newer encoding system that uses a significantly
different system for character encoding that allows it to surpass
the 256 character limit. Over 100,000 characters are currently
supported by Unicode/UTF-8.