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In Computer and machine-based Telecommunication s terminology, a character is a unit of Information that roughly corresponds to a Grapheme , or symbol, 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 Character s, 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 Printer s or other devices that display such texts. CHARACTER ENCODING See Also: 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 Bit s, 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 Font s 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
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