Talk:Character (computing)

message: What is the difference between a char (character) and a byte/bit? I work with some programing and cant figure it out, Is a byte and a character the same length i.e. does 255 bytes/bits equal 255 characters? 75.15.236.62
:Only if your characters are formed from single octets. So this bytes=characters stuff was widely true in the 70s and 80s when ASCII and EBCDIC reigned supreme, but now, as multi-byte characters sets such as Unicode are becoming common, you an no longer assume that one character equals one byte.
:Atlant 12:53, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Char vs. Bit/byte 

message: Unicode is great and, all things considered, fairly well designed.  However, its concept of "character" is far from consistent.  For example, while it distinguishes aleph-hebrew-letter from aleph-math-symbol, it does not distinguish between X-roman-letter and X-math-symbol.These decisions are not based on logic, but are merely attempts to accomodate the habits of programmers from each language community.  Thus,  it does distinguish between capital "X" and lowercase "X", because those already had different codes in ASCII and ISO-Latin-1; but it does not distinguish between boldface "X" and italic "X", or between the two common shapes of italic "a", because programmers were used to encode these attributes separately from the characters. So, please let's not make the mistake of presenting the Unicode's definition as the word of the Gods. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 13:27, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thinking that some abstract distinction between aleph-hebrew and aleph-math is meaningful is a bit narrowminded. I do not know how well Unicode handles different levels of abstraction, but a major consideration in multiplying the various possible different meanings of a glyph is whether it would be USEFUL. Note that 'logic' isn't directly involved. IOW, one question the group developing the Unicode standard must have had was: should glyph xxxx be represented as more than one abstract character or can it be 'translated' unambiguously using just one? To some extent this requires a mapping of each 'character' between all of the 'languages' that use it. (This has to be superimposed over the code pages already (historically) present which needed to be included in the standard.) Unfortunately, Unicode failed to invent a different term for 'abstract character' so guaranteeing its truncation by some authors to 'character' which already was quite ambiguous/multimeaninged. I wonder if they considered it, and found that even if they invented a term, they couldn't define it definitively (so as to make it sufficiently useful in a large number of contexts).72.172.1.40 (talk) 20:24, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Unicode definition of character 

message: The article claimed that "According to statistics collected by Google, UTF-8 is the most common encoding used on web pages".  No question about that; however, that statistic only refers to the encoding used for web pages that are delivered by HTTP servers over the net.  But I believe that servers can be configured to automatically map national character encodings to UTF-8, for the benefit of foreign browsers; is that correct?  In any case, since Unicode/UTF-8 is the de-facto (if not official) standard encoding for HTML files, that statistics does not say much about the adoption of Unicode/UTF-8 for other kinds of files.  All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 14:19, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The UTF-8 Google statistics 

message: Somebody added a page describing a "word character". The links points to a description of regexp that actually describes a "whitespace character" in the same paragraph, and several other character classes nearby. IMHO this has nothing to do with the basic subject of characters, and there certainly is nothing special about "word character", should we perhaps list every single classification used by any regexp library here?Spitzak (talk) 19:18, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "word character" 

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thread_title:  External links modified