Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, Mark Davis, Google's senior international software architect, said in a blog post.

What other common (or uncommon I suppose...) text encoding formats are there besides ASCII and Unicode.<BR><BR>I know that in ASCII the string 12345 would be stored as 3132333435. I've seen that ...

I suspected this because, due to some technical quirks of how rare unicode characters are tokenized by GPT-4, the corresponding ASCII is very evident to the model.

One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII. However, while you could technically encode the raw bits of Unicode into characters, like Base64 , there’s a snag.