through (outside ascii' rangeto special characters one such standardknown as the latin- character setis widely used in western europe in latin- character codes above are assigned to accented and otherwise special characters the character assigned to byte value for exampleis specially marked non-ascii character xc chr( 'apython result form shown this standard allows for wide array of extra special charactersbut still supports ascii as -bit subset of its -bit representation stillsome alphabets define so many characters that it is impossible to represent each of them as one byte unicode allows more flexibility unicode text is sometimes referred to as "wide-characterstringsbecause characters may be represented with multiple bytes if needed unicode is typically used in internationalized programsto represent europeanasianand other non-english character sets that have more characters than -bit bytes can represent to store such rich text in computer memorywe say that characters are translated to and from raw bytes using an encoding--the rules for translating string of unicode characters to sequence of bytesand extracting string from sequence of bytes more procedurallythis translation back and forth between bytes and strings is defined by two termsencoding is the process of translating string of characters into its raw bytes formaccording to desired encoding name decoding is the process of translating raw string of bytes into its character string formaccording to its encoding name that iswe encode from string to raw bytesand decode from raw bytes to string to scriptsdecoded strings are just characters in memorybut may be encoded into variety of byte string representations when stored on filestransferred over networksembedded in documents and databasesand so on for some encodingsthe translation process is trivial--ascii and latin- for instancemap each character to fixed-size single byteso no translation work is required for other encodingsthe mapping can be more complex and yield multiple bytes per charactereven for simple -bit forms of text the widely used utf- encodingfor exampleallows wide range of characters to be represented by employing variable-sized number of bytes scheme character codes less than are represented as single bytecodes between and ff ( are turned into byteswhere each byte has value between and and codes above ff are turned into or -byte sequences having values between and this unicode and byte strings