What's the difference between encoding and charset?
Basically:
- charset is the set of characters you can use
- encoding is the way these characters are stored into memory
Every encoding has a particular charset associated with it, but there can be more than one encoding for a given charset. A charset is simply what it sounds like, a set of characters. There are a large number of charsets, including many that are intended for particular scripts or languages.
However, we are well along the way in the transition to Unicode, which includes a character set capable of representing almost all the world's scripts. However, there are multiple encodings for Unicode. An encoding is a way of mapping a string of characters to a string of bytes. Examples of Unicode encodings include UTF-8, UTF-16 BE, and UTF-16 LE . Each of these has advantages for particular applications or machine architectures.
In addition to the other answers I think this article is a good read https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
The article is titled "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" written by Joel Spolsky. The essay is from 2003 but (unfortunately) the content is still valid...