As described in Section 2.3, a character encoding is a mapping from a set of abstract characters to a set of nonnegative integers. The result specifies how characters can be represented numerically within a computer. The integer associated with an abstract character in an encoding is called the code point for the character.
A conversion is the process of mapping characters from one character encoding to another. For example, the Chinese character 
(meaning "middle, center") is encoded in UTF-16 with code point 4E2D, but represented in the Big5 encoding by code point A4A4. Note that conversion does not change the characters themselves; it merely changes the numbers used to represent those characters within the computer.
The Internationalization Module uses the UTF-16 character encoding form to represent Unicode strings. In UTF-16, each 21-bit Unicode code point is represented using one or two 16-bit code units. (See Section 2.4.) The Internationalization Module provides conversion classes that let you convert strings from every standard encoding into UTF-16, and convert UTF-16 strings into any recognized encoding.
This chapter describes how to:
get lists of the encoding names currently recognized by the Internationalization Module, their aliases, and the names of the standards bodies that apply to them
explicitly convert text to and from Unicode, by specifying a converter to use
implicitly convert text to and from Unicode, by specifying a conversion context
specify how errors that occur in the conversion process should be handled
Note that the Internationalization Module does not directly convert between arbitrary encodings. However, you can do so indirectly by first converting a string to UTF-16, then reconverting the string from UTF-16 to the target encoding.
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