sequencesstringslistsand files about the encoding/decoding process in the early days of computingdifferent designers and manufacturers used different encodings you can imagine what headache this was for people transferring data between different systems consider situation that would result ifsaypcs and macintosh computers each used their own encoding if you type term paper on pc and save it as text filethe characters in your paper are represented as certain sequence of numbers thenif the file was read into your instructor' macintosh computerthe numbers would be displayed on the screen as different characters from the ones you typed the result would be gibberishto avoid this sort of problemcomputer systems today use industry standard encodings one important standard is called ascii (american standard code for information interchangeascii uses the numbers through to represent the characters typically found on an (americancomputer keyboardas well as certain special values known as control codes that are used to coordinate the sending and receiving of information for examplethe capital letters - are represented by the values - and the lowercase versions have codes - one problem with the ascii encodingas its name impliesis that it is american-centric it does not have symbols that are needed in many other languages extended ascii encodings have been developed by the international standards organization to remedy this situation most modern systems are moving to the support of unicodea much larger standard that includes support for the characters of nearly all written languages python strings support the unicode standardso you can wrangle characters from just about any languageprovided your operating system has appropriate fonts for displaying the characters python provides couple of built-in functions that allow us to switch back and forth between characters and the numeric values used to represent them in strings the ord function returns the numeric ("ordinal"code of single-character stringwhile chr goes the other direction here are some interactive examplesord(" " ord(" " chr( 'achr( 'zif you're reading very carefullyyou might notice that these results are consistent with the ascii encoding of characters that mentioned above by designunicode uses the same codes as ascii for the characters originally defined there but unicode includes many more exotic characters as well for examplethe greek letter pi is character and the symbol for the euro is character there' one more piece in the puzzle of how to store characters in computer memory as you know from the underlying cpu deals with memory in fixed-sized pieces the smallest addressable piece is typically bitswhich is called byte of memory single byte can store