Abstract: The invention relates to a method of encoding a Chinese type character. The method comprises subdividing the whole said character into N elements in a given order, said order being specific to said character; associating with each of the N elements, in said given order, an elementary descriptor, each of these elementary descriptors being based on the structure of said element with which it is associated; defining a base reference constituted by the elementary descriptors defined at the previous step, these elementary descriptors being placed in said given order. By using this invention, it becomes straightforward to find back a character using its code, to encode, in a logical manner, a new character and add it to the set of characters already encoded, and to classify characters based on their structure. In this way, the “external character problem” is solved.