Each letter, number, punctuation character, and control character used on a computer has a binary value associated with it. Computer developers have defined schemes for coding the characters so that computers understand them. The process of coding the characters into machine-readable language is called character encoding.
Different encoding schemes exist that encode characters differently. For example, encoding letters and numbers from a U.S. keyboard are usually not a problem in North America; however, in another country, there may not be characters that correspond to the North American characters. Common data values that can cause problems in other environments include null, TAB, and accented letters (such as Ñ).
In AAMVAnet, you can use a variety of encoding schemes to make sure that characters in your data are translated correctly. For more information, see the tabs below or contact AAMVA Enterprise Architecture.