Character (computing)
In computer science 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.
Description
Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, common punctuation marks (such as "." or "-"), and whitespace.
Control characters
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 and tab, as well as instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text.
Strings
Characters are typically combined into strings.
See also
- Alphabet
- Character encodings in HTML
- Computer science
- Control character
- Grapheme
- Grapheme-like unit
- Information
- Letter
- Natural language
- Newline
- Numerical digit
- Punctuation mark
- String (computer science)
- Syllabary
- Symbol
- Whitespace
External Links
- Character (computing) @ Wikipedia
