What is the role of character encoding in digital communication?

Character encoding plays a critical role in digital communication by defining how characters are represented in binary code, enabling computers to understand and process human-readable text. It assigns unique binary values to each character, symbol, or letter, ensuring that when data is transmitted or stored, the original textual information can be accurately reconstructed by the receiving system.

For instance, the widely used encoding schemes like ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and UTF-8 (which supports a much larger set of characters) illustrate how character encoding facilitates the exchange of textual information across different systems and platforms by ensuring they interpret the data in the same way. This foundational aspect of digital communication affects how users interact with software, transfer files, and share information, as it provides a standardized way to represent text across various devices and applications.