Some Boring Stuff You Need To Understand Before You Can Dive In

Few people think about it, but text is incredibly complicated. Start with the alphabet. The people of Bougainville have the smallest alphabet in the world; their Rotokas alphabet is composed of only 12 letters: A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U, and V. On the other end of the spectrum, languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have thousands of characters. English, of course, has 26 letters — 52 if you count uppercase and lowercase separately — plus a handful of !@#$%& punctuation marks.

When you talk about “text,” you’re probably thinking of “characters and symbols on my computer screen.” But computers don’t deal in characters and symbols; they deal in bits and bytes. Every piece of text you’ve ever seen on a computer screen is actually stored in a particular character encoding. Very roughly speaking, the character encoding provides a mapping between the stuff you see on your screen and the stuff your computer actually stores in memory and on disk. There are many different character encodings, some optimized for particular languages like Russian or Chinese or English, ...