coded character set

    A mapping, generally 1:1, from a set of
   integers, known as character codes or code positions, to
   a set of characters that may include letters, digits,
   punctuation, control codes, mathematical and typographic
   symbols.

   There are several standard coded character sets, the most
   widely used is ASCII, generally in its Latin-1 dialect,
   with Unicode becoming slowly more common; while EBCDIC and
   Baudot are extinct except in legacy systems.

   (2009-01-06)