Common character encodings
ASCII
Generally pronounced as ass-key, it is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters — have a historical basis in ASCII.
ISO-8859-2
More formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-2:1987 or less formally as Latin-2, is part 2 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. 2, consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script, each encoded as a single 8-bit code value.
UTF-8
The UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is consistent with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.