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In computer terms, a character is the basic unit of information representing a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or control character within a natural language or text. Characters are encoded as numerical values (integers) using a character set (like ASCII or Unicode) and stored in memory as binary sequences (bits and bytes). A sequence of characters forms a string, which is used to represent textual data in computer programs and systems.

What a Character Is:

A unit of information: A single symbol, like 'A', '7', or '$'.

A natural language symbol: Includes letters, numerals, and punctuation marks.

A control character: Non-printing characters that control hardware or text processing, such as a tab or a newline.

How Characters Are Represented and Stored:

Numerical Representation: Each character is assigned a unique numerical value, determined by a character encoding scheme.

Character Sets: These are tables that map characters to their corresponding numerical values. Examples include ASCII (8-bit) and Unicode.

Binary Storage: The numerical value of a character is stored as a sequence of 1s and 0s (bits and bytes) in a computer's memory.

Variable-Length Encoding: Modern systems like UTF-8 use a variable number of bytes (1 to 4) to represent different characters, allowing for a wide range of symbols from various languages.