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Information about Character (computing)

For other uses, see 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.

An example of a character is a letter, numeral, or punctuation mark. 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.

Character encoding

Main article: character encoding
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. The most common encoding is ASCII, though the more versatile Unicode is quickly becoming popular. 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.

Terminology

Historically, the term character has been widely used by industry professionals to refer to an encoded character (often only as exposed via a programming language's API). Likewise, character set has been widely used to refer to a specific repertoire of abstract characters that have been mapped to specific bit sequences. With the advent of Unicode and bit-agnostic encoding forms, more precise terminology is increasingly favored.

It is important, in some contexts, to make the distinction that a character is a unit of information, and thus does not imply any particular visual manifestation. For example, the Hebrew letter Aleph ("א") is often used by mathematicians to denote certain kinds of infinity, but it is also used in ordinary Hebrew text. In Unicode, these two uses are different characters and are signified by two different codes, though they may be rendered identically. Conversely, the Chinese logogram for water ("水") may have a slightly different appearance in Japanese texts than it does in Chinese texts, and local typefaces may reflect this. But they nonetheless represent the same information, are considered the same character, and share the same Unicode code point.

The term glyph is used to describe a particular physical appearance of a character. Many computer fonts consist of glyphs that are indexed by the Unicode code point of the character that each glyph represents.

The definition of character, or abstract character, is mutually defined by The Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646 as "a member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, or representation of data." Unicode's definition supplements this with explanatory notes that encourage the reader to differentiate between characters, graphemes, and glyphs, among other things. The standards also differentiate between these abstract characters and coded characters or encoded characters that have been paired with numeric codes that facilitate their representation in computers.

See also

External links

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Character (word) (from the Greek χαρακτήρ "engraved or stamped mark (on coins or seals), branding mark, symbol") may refer to:

In the arts:

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computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

Computers take numerous physical forms. The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century (around 1940 - 1941), although the computer concept and various machines
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Telecommunication is the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication. In modern times, this process typically involves the sending of electromagnetic waves by electronic transmitters, but in earlier times telecommunication may have involved the use of
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Information is the result of processing, gathering, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver. In other words, it is the context in which data is taken.
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grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.

In a phonemic orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme.
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ABCs redirects here, for the Alien Big Cats, see British big cats.


An alphabet is a standardized set of letters
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syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound.
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written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages.
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In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a language that is spoken, written, or signed (visually or tactilely) by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages (such as computer-programming
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numeral system (or system of numeration) is a framework where a set of numbers are represented by numerals in a consistent manner. It can be seen as the context that allows the numeral "11" to be interpreted as the binary numeral for three
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Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks (listed at right), inter-word spaces, capitalization, and indentation.
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In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point (a number) in a character set that does not in itself represent a written symbol.
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Originally, carriage return was the term for the control character in Baudot code on a teletypewriter for end of line return to beginning of line and did not include line feed.
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tab key on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next "tab stop".

Origin

Tab is the abbreviation of Tabulator. To tabulate (tabulating) means putting something into a table or chart.
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A computer printer, or more commonly a printer, produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper transparencies.
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A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes referred to as code page) with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in
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A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes referred to as code page) with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in
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The integers (from the Latin integer, which means with untouched integrity, whole, entire) are the set of numbers including the whole numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, …) and their negatives (0, −1, −2, −3, …).
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BIT is an acronym for:
  • Bannari amman Institute of Technology
  • Bangalore Institute of Technology
  • Beijing Institute of Technology
  • Benzisothiazolinone
  • Bilateral Investment Treaty
  • Bhilai Institute of Technology - Durg

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Computer data storage, computer memory, and often casually storage or memory refer to computer components, devices and recording media that retain digital data used for computing for some interval of time.
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as a college campus, industrial complex, or a military base. A CAN, may be considered a type of MAN (metropolitan area network), but is generally limited to an area that is smaller than a typical MAN.
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American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), generally pronounced ask-ee IPA: /ˈæski/ ( [1] ), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet.
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Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard
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Morse code is a method for transmitting telegraphic information, using standardized sequences of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a message.
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A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages, like natural languagess, are defined by syntactic and semantic rules which describe their structure and meaning respectively.
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An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.
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Phoenician alphabet

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The word infinity comes from the Latin infinitas or "unboundedness." It refers to several distinct concepts (usually linked to the idea of "without end") which arise in philosophy, mathematics, and theology.
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logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound
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glyph is the shape given in a particular typeface to a specific grapheme or symbol.

The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is character: a typographical character may be a grapheme (an element of a writing system), but also a numeral, a punctuation
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