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Sometimes, though, for reasons of convenience or due to technical limitations, documents are encoded with an encoding that cannot represent some characters directly. For example, the widely used encodings based on [[ISO 8859]] can only represent, at most, 256 unique characters as one 8-bit [[byte]] each.
Documents are rarely, in practice, ever allowed to use more than one encoding internally, so the onus is usually on the markup language to provide a means for document authors to express unencodable characters in terms of encodable ones. This is generally done through some kind of [[escape character|"escaping"
The SGML-based markup languages allow document authors to use special sequences of characters from the ASCII range (the first 128 code points of Unicode) to represent, or ''reference'', any Unicode character, regardless of whether the character being represented is directly available in the document's encoding. These special sequences are ''character references''.
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