byteCount

Bytecount, or byte count, is the amount of data expressed in bytes. It is used to quantify storage requirements, data transfer volumes, and limits on processing. In most modern computer systems a byte is eight bits and serves as the basic addressable unit of memory. Historically, some architectures used non-8-bit bytes, but this is rare today.

Data size is commonly expressed with prefixes indicating multiples of a byte. Decimal prefixes such as kilobyte (kB), megabyte (MB), and gigabyte (GB) denote powers of 1000. Binary prefixes such as kibibyte (KiB), mebibyte (MiB), and gibibyte (GiB) denote powers of 1024. Because software and hardware sometimes mix conventions, the exact byte count can be ambiguous unless the unit is specified.

In text processing, byte count measures the length of data in bytes. The number of characters in a string may differ from its byte count when using variable-length encodings such as UTF-8; ASCII characters are one byte, while many other characters require two or more bytes.

In computing contexts, byte count is used for file sizes, memory usage, and network payloads. Protocols often include length fields that specify how many bytes follow; the representation of multi-byte lengths may be affected by endianness. Byte counting remains a simple, hardware-oriented metric, even as higher-level concepts such as character or code-point count become relevant for text.