Character (computing)

In computing and telecommunications, a character is the encoded representation of a natural language character (including letter, numeral and punctuation), whitespace (space or tab), or a control character (controls computer hardware that consumes character-based data). A sequence of characters is called a string.

Some character encoding systems represent each character using a fixed number of bits whereas other systems use varying sizes. Various fixed-length sizes were used for now obsolete systems such as the six-bit character code,^[1][2] the five-bit Baudot code and even 4-bit systems (with only 16 possible values).^[3] The more modern ASCII system uses the 8-bit byte for each character. Today, the Unicode-based UTF-8 encoding uses a varying number of byte-sized code units to define a code point which combine to encode a character.