Character (computing)

In computing, a character is an indivisibly small unit of text. It can be a letter, a word-space, a punctuation mark, a digit, a Chinese character, etc. By "indivisibly small" I mean indivisibly small in the computer's memory. A computer will store the word "ice" as 3 separate characters: "i", "c", "e". However, it will not store the dot of the "i" separately from the stem!

As an example, this sentence contains 111 characters: 79 letters, 6 punctuation marks, 9 digits, and 17 spaces.

Almost all English characters are 1 byte in memory.