Primer on Character Encoding Settings with HTML/PHP While as humans we perceive words as a collection of letters or glyphs as full word representations (e.g., Chinese) computers store everything as a binary representation, including letters. Every letter is represented in binary as some numeric value which is constant within a character set. The most familiar simple character set is the ASCII Character Set, which covers most standard English letters and numbers. However of course, other letters exists… 8 May 2010 :: Web Development :: #utf-8 #iso-8859-1 #mojibake #ascii #encoding #character set