C# 7 and .NET Core: Modern Cross-Platform Development - Second Edition

Encoding text

Text characters can be represented in different ways. For example, the alphabet can be encoded using Morse code into a series of dots and dashes for transmission over a telegraph line.

In a similar way, text inside a computer is stored as bits (ones and zeros). .NET Core uses a standard called Unicode to encode text internally. Sometimes, you will need to move text outside .NET Core for use by systems that do not use Unicode or use a variation of Unicode.

The following table lists some alternative text encodings commonly used by computers:

Encoding	Description
ASCII	This encodes a limited range of characters using the lower seven bits of a byte
UTF-8	This represents each Unicode code point as a sequence of one to four bytes