Character is a unit of information used to represent text in computers. It is encoded as a number in memory so that computers can process it. A character can represent a letter, a number, a special symbol, or a sequence of bytes that forms a word, phrase, or special character.
In computer programming, a character is the smallest meaningful unit of a program. It can be a letter, a number, a symbol, or a sequence of bytes that forms a special character. Depending on the programming language, there is usually a connection between a character and its code point, which is a numerical representation of the character in the computer.
In computing, character sets are used to represent the characters of different languages. An example of a character set is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which is a set of 128 characters for English letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols. Other languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, use larger character sets.
Various encoding methods are used to represent characters in computers. The most common is the unicode standard, which is a universal standard for encoding characters from all languages. It provides over 128,000 characters in a variety of scripts.
The term character is also used to refer to the visual representation of a letter, number, or other symbol on a computer screen. This is typically referred to as a glyph. Fonts, which are collections of glyphs, are used to render these characters on the screen.
In the past, computers used limited character sets with limited character options. This typically meant that foreign characters could not be displayed correctly on the screen. In today’s world, most operating systems can display character sets from different languages correctly.
