Abstract: The international scope of computing, information interchange, and electronic publishing created a need for a worldwide character encoding scheme. In this paper, we examine some of the issues involved in the process of standardization of character codes primarily for the 8-bit machine and subsequently for the 16-bit code environments in the context of Sinhala language and scripts. We examined some of the major issues involved in machine representation of textual information in graphical and phonetic approach for Sinhala scripts. A comprehensive evaluation of some of the possible representation is also presented