Char

Char is a unit of information representing a single character in computing, typically encoded as a glyph from an alphabet. The term comes from "character." In most modern systems a char is a code point or a code unit in an encoding such as ASCII or Unicode. The exact size depends on language and encoding.

In programming languages, char is a data type. In C and C++, char typically occupies one byte (8 bits) and may be signed or unsigned, used to store character codes or small integers; C strings are arrays of char ending with a null terminator. In Java, char is a 16-bit unsigned type representing a UTF-16 code unit; to represent astral plane characters, surrogate pairs are used. In C#, char is a 16-bit Unicode character (UTF-16).

In practical use, char values are manipulated via character literals, such as 'A', and through encoding-aware APIs; conversion between char and numeric types is common, and handling UTF-8 vs UTF-16 can be a source of bugs.

Other meanings: Char as an English verb means to burn the surface of something; char can also be a given name or part of proper nouns.