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Chars, short for characters, are elemental units of text used in computer processing. A char represents a single symbol from a character set, such as a letter, digit, or punctuation, and is often the basic building block of strings. The precise representation of a char depends on the programming language and the encoding in use; some treat a char as a simple code point, others as a small container for a byte or code unit.

In C and C++, a char is typically one byte wide and can hold an 8-bit value corresponding to an ASCII character or part of a multibyte encoding. C programmers commonly store text in char arrays. Since Unicode, there are related types like wchar_t, char16_t, and char32_t for wider encodings. In Java, a char is a 16-bit unsigned value representing a UTF-16 code unit. A single visual character outside the BMP may require two chars (a surrogate pair) to represent.

In Python, there is no distinct char type; strings are sequences of Unicode code points. Accessing an element yields a one-character string rather than a separate char type, and the internal encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32) is abstracted away from the user.

When stored or transmitted, chars are encoded into a byte sequence according to an encoding such as UTF-8, UTF-16, or ASCII. Understanding the distinction between code points and code units matters for processing non-ASCII characters and for correct indexing, normalization, and string manipulation.