Tavujoukko

Tavujoukko is a Finnish computing term for a fixed-length group of consecutive bytes treated as a single unit for storage, transmission, or processing. It is not a formal standard, but a descriptive label used in textbooks, documentation, and software discussions to refer to a defined data block.

The word is formed from tavu meaning byte and joukko meaning group. The term emphasizes bundling bytes together rather than their individual values and appears in informal Finnish technical writing and programming discussions.

Typical tavujoukko sizes are powers of two, such as 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 bytes. In practice, a tavujoukko is realized as a fixed-length field or a byte array segment in binary formats, memory buffers, or network messages.

Interpreting a tavujoukko depends on endianness when encoding numeric data. In little-endian layouts, the least significant byte comes first; in big-endian, the most significant byte comes first. The same bytes may represent different values depending on the interpretation.

Examples include a 4-byte tavujoukko storing a 32-bit integer or an 8-byte tavujoukko storing a 64-bit integer. A 16-byte tavujoukko can hold a UUID. In software design, tavujoukko are common in low-level data structures, binary formats, and network protocols.

Related concepts include byte, buffer, field, and data block. While a tavujoukko denotes a fixed-length chunk of bytes, a field is a subpart within a structure, and a buffer may hold several tavujoukko blocks. The term is mostly found in Finnish-language materials.