charvalue

Charvalue is a term used to describe the value associated with a single character in computing. In practice, charvalue refers to the numeric or encoded representation of a character, which depends on the character set and encoding in use. The concept distinguishes between a character’s symbolic appearance and the underlying value used by a computer to store, transmit, or compare it.

Encoding and code points: In Unicode, each character has a code point (for example, U+0041 for 'A'). When stored or transmitted, the character may be represented by multiple bytes in encodings such as UTF-8 or by one or more code units in UTF-16. The charvalue thus may mean the Unicode code point or the actual encoded bytes, depending on the context and encoding scheme.

Language-specific considerations: In C and C++, a char typically stores a single byte, and converting it to an unsigned type yields its numeric value in the range 0–255. In Java, a char is a 16-bit code unit with values from 0 to 65535, representing UTF-16 units. In Python, characters in strings have Unicode code points, and functions like ord() return the numeric code point of a character.

Applications: Charvalue is used in encoding conversions, character classification, sorting, hashing, and data serialization. It is also involved in input validation, text processing, and low-level I/O where a numeric representation of a character is required.

Ambiguities: The term can be ambiguous because it may refer to a code point, an encoded byte, or a display glyph, and normalization or combining characters can affect how a character’s value is interpreted across different systems. Related concepts include code points, code units, and character encodings.