In computer terminology, a
character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a
grapheme, or written symbol, of a
natural language, such as a letter, numeral, or punctuation mark. The concept also includes
control characters, which do not correspond to natural language symbols but to other bits of information used to process texts of the language, such as instructions to
printers or other devices that display such texts. It is important to make the distinction that a character is a unit of
information, and does not imply any particular physical appearance. For example, the character "A" represents a letter of the
Roman alphabet, which might be displayed or printed in a number of different sizes, typeface
?s, colors, and so forth; but all of those are different manifetation of the same character "A". The term
glyph is used to describe a particular physical appearance of a character.
Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that matches each character with an integer that can be stored and manipulated. The most common such encoding is ASCII, though Unicode is quickly becoming popular.
See also Text encoding.
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