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, and common punctuation marks (such as '.' or '-'). The concept also includes control characters, which do not correspond to symbols in a particular natural language, but rather to other bits of information used to process text in one or more languages. 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.
Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of bits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of popular encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. While most character encodings map characters to numbers and/or bit sequences, Morse code instead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length.
