A text is a sequence of characters. A text file contains such a text whereby the characters are represented by numbers. The mapping between these characters in a text and these numbers in a file is called an encoding. Confusion arises when people or programs communicate using different encodings 😞. For instance, a text file containing the following bytes (hexadecimal): “48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 2e”, would be interpreted using the IBM284 encoding, a Spanish variant of EBCDIC, as: “çÁ%%?€ï?Ê%À”, but using UTF16LE encoding, it would be interpreted as “效汬潗汲”. Finally, using an ASCII encoding, it would be interpreted as: “Hello World”.



Lots more to explore here