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In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary 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 characters, which do not correspond to symbols in a particular natural language, but rather to other bits of information used to process text in one or more languages. Examples of control characters include carriage return or tab, as well as instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text. Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of bits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of popular encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. According to statistics collected by Google, UTF-8 is the most common encoding used on web pages [1]. 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. 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.
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