What is Character (computing)?
{{nosources|date=April 2013}} For computers, a '''character''' is a [[letter]], number, or punctuation mark that can be shown on a screen, or printed. There are also some unseen characters, called ''control characters''. An example of a control character is the carriage return or line feed that tells the [[software]] to start a new line. A ''[[glyph]]'' is the shape of the character that is seen when put on screen or on paper. Since computers only use [[number]]s, they use number [[code]]s to represent characters. For example, in [[ASCII]], the number 65 represents the letter 'A'. The computer knows, when working in ASCII, to put the glyph for 'A' on the screen when it sees the number 65. The glyph can change shape slightly depending on the [[font]] that is used, if it is '''bold''' or in ''italics'', etc. But it is still stored as a 65 in the computer, that does not change. == ASCII and Unicode == [[File:Test_Unicode_cinese_semplificato2.jpg|thumb|200px|Chinese characters]] One of the early standards for storing characters was [[ASCII]]. It uses 7 [[bit]]s to store each character. This allows 128 characters - enough for the numbers 0-9, the upper case letters A-Z, lower case letters a-z, most punctuation marks including spaces, parentheses and braces, and some control characters. But it is not enough for letters used in other languages, such as [[umlaut]]s used in [[German language|German]] and [[Scandinavia]]n languages. Some systems added an 8th bit to ASCII, for another 128 characters, but the extra characters can vary from one system to another. And this doesn't address all languages. There are thousands of [[Chinese characters]] alone. To store all of these characters, [[Unicode]] was developed. It uses 16 bits to store 65,536 characters. ASCII is still widely used, especially in the English-speaking areas. The [[Internet]] was started in English, and until 2010 [[Uniform Resource Locator|URL]] addresses could only contain certain ASCII characters. Some ASCII characters that are not suppor