Caracteres

Caracteres, a term used in Spanish and Portuguese to mean “characters,” refer to the basic units of written text. In typography and computing, a character is an abstract unit that can be encoded and processed by a system; a glyph is the visible mark representing a character on screen or on paper. Different fonts may render the same character with different shapes, while ligatures can merge multiple characters into a single glyph.

Characters encompass letters, digits, punctuation, symbols, whitespace, and control characters. They can be organized into scripts such as Latin, Cyrillic, Han, or Arabic, among others, and may be used in combinations to form words and symbols.

Character encoding defines how characters are stored and transmitted. ASCII originally defined 128 characters, sufficient for English text. Unicode now provides a universal set of code points for hundreds of scripts and symbols, with encoding forms such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 is the most common on the web, using one to four bytes per code point. In text processing, normalization forms (for example NFC and NFD) standardize how composed and decomposed sequences are represented, and grapheme clusters describe user-perceived characters that may be made from multiple code points (for example letters with combining marks).

Practical concerns include font coverage, rendering, input methods, and storage size. Programs typically perform operations such as counting, searching, sorting, case folding, and locale-aware comparison on characters, while databases and programming languages may implement Unicode-aware APIs to handle multilingual text robustly.