Character (computing) - Char

A char in the C programming language and C++ programming language is a fixed-size byte entity.

It was specified to be large enough to store a character value from ASCII or other encodings. By far the most common size is 8 bits, allowing 256 different values to be stored in a char. This is twice the size of ASCII and allowed a large number of 8-bit extended character sets to be used, but led to impossibility to directly store characters from Unicode and other modern sets in a single char. Instead larger storage units such as wchar t, or variable-length encodings such as UTF-8, are used. char16_t and char32_t have been added to C++ language to store 16 bits and 32 bits code units.

Unfortunately, the fact that a character was stored in byte led to the two terms being used interchangeably in most documentation. This often makes the documentation confusing or misleading when multibyte encodings such as UTF-8 are used, and has led to inefficient and incorrect implementations of string manipulation functions.

POSIX defines "character" as a sequence of one or more bytes representing a single graphic symbol or control code, and attempts to use "byte" when referring to char data. However it defines Character Array as an array of elements of type char.