Character

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language.

Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, common punctuation marks (such as “.” or “-“), and whitespace. The concept also includes control characters, which do not correspond to visible symbols but rather to instructions to format or process the text. Examples of control characters include carriage return or tab, as well as instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text.

Characters are typically combined into strings.

Historically, the term character was also used to just denote a specific number of contiguous bits. While a character is most commonly assumed to refer to 8 bits (one byte) today, other definitions, like 4 bits or 6 bits, have been used in the past as well.