Characters

• Character set

  The set of symbols that may be represented in a computer at a particular time. These symbols, called characters, can be letters, digits, spaces or punctuation marks, the set includes control characters
• ASCII

  America Standard Code for Information Interchange: A character set devised for early telecommunication systems but proved to be ideal for computer systems. ASCII codes use 7-bits giving 32 control codes and 96 displayable characters (the 8th bit is often used for error checking)
• Unicode

  Standard character set that replaces the need for all the different character sets. It incorporates characters from almost all the world's languages. It is a 16-bit extension of ASCII