How many bits or bytes are there in a character? [closed]

How many bits or bytes are there per "character"?

Solution 1:

It depends what is the character and what encoding it is in:

• An ASCII character in 8-bit ASCII encoding is 8 bits (1 byte), though it can fit in 7 bits.

• An ISO-8895-1 character in ISO-8859-1 encoding is 8 bits (1 byte).

• A Unicode character in UTF-8 encoding is between 8 bits (1 byte) and 32 bits (4 bytes).

• A Unicode character in UTF-16 encoding is between 16 (2 bytes) and 32 bits (4 bytes), though most of the common characters take 16 bits. This is the encoding used by Windows internally.

• A Unicode character in UTF-32 encoding is always 32 bits (4 bytes).

• An ASCII character in UTF-8 is 8 bits (1 byte), and in UTF-16 - 16 bits.

• The additional (non-ASCII) characters in ISO-8895-1 (0xA0-0xFF) would take 16 bits in UTF-8 and UTF-16.

That would mean that there are between 0.03125 and 0.125 characters in a bit.

Solution 2:

There are 8 bits in a byte (normally speaking in Windows).

However, if you are dealing with characters, it will depend on the charset/encoding. Unicode character can be 2 or 4 bytes, so that would be 16 or 32 bits, whereas Windows-1252 sometimes incorrectly called ANSI is only 1 bytes so 8 bits.

In Asian version of Windows and some others, the entire system runs in double-byte, so a character is 16 bits.

EDITED

Per Matteo's comment, all contemporary versions of Windows use 16-bits internally per character.