Character Encoding 101

Consider this character: É

In the iso-8859-1 character encoding, it is represented by a single byte: 0xC9

In the utf-8 character encoding, it is represented by a two bytes: 0xC3 0x89

In the ucs-2 character encoding, it is represented by a two bytes: 0x00 0xC9

You now understand character encoding -- the charset (i.e. character encoding) tells a program how to interpret bytes as characters.