Representing strings of characters is essentially a two-step process:
- Creating a mapping between each character required and an integer.
- Devising an encoding scheme for placing a sequence of numbers into memory.
The simplest systems map the required characters to small integers between 0 and 255, and encode sequences of characters as sequences of bytes with the appropriate numeric values.
Representing characters for repertoires that require more than 256 characters, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, requires more complex schemes.