Sometimes the received e-mail may instead of text contain a very bizarre mixture of symbols and graphic signs, reminiscent of hieroglyphs, which, with someone's "light hand", was dubbed "kryakozyabrami". This happens not only with the text of letters, but also with the content of web pages, some text files, and even with inscriptions in the interface of computer programs.
When saving and displaying letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other text elements on the screen, the computer operating system uses special tables. All these symbols are placed in them in a strictly defined order. When you save any document containing text, not the letters and numbers themselves are written to the file, but their serial numbers in this table. When you open such a document, the opposite operation occurs - the application reads the character numbers from the file and displays the corresponding characters from the table on the page. These tables are called "character sets" (CharSets for short) or "encodings".
There are quite a few such tables - several dozen. At first, each competing manufacturer of computer software created its own symbol table, then tables were created for various national alphabets with the obligatory inclusion of English, then, as operating systems improved, their variants were created for new possibilities, etc. If the text written and saved using one such table is then opened using another, then the result will be what we call the word "kryakozyabry" - the numbers of the symbols will remain the same, but the symbols corresponding to them in this table will be completely different.
An indication of the encoding that a computer application should use to display the text content of a file is written in the service field of this file. If the text is transmitted over networks, then the indication of the encoding is sent in the service field of the transmitted information packet. In the HTML-code of web pages, a special tag is used to store the name of the used encoding. In an e-mail message, the encoding is transmitted in service fields along with information about the sender, recipient, etc. If there is no indication of the encoding by any of the above methods, then you will have to deal with the crackers manually - try to select the desired encoding using the means of the application you are using. Such a function is provided both in the browser and in the mail client, and a text editor (for example, Microsoft Word) itself tries to determine the correct encoding by indirect indications.
It seems that today a character table standard has finally been created that suits everyone - it is called "Unicode". But the transition to it is still just being made, so you will have to deal with mallard ducks for several more years.
