Some character encodings exclude characters that are included in other character encodings.A character encoding pairs characters with unique integers.So, now we know a few things about character encodings: You can represent this pairing using tuples in Python: What does that mean?ĭoesn’t it mean that you can pair each character with a number? So, you could do something like pair each uppercase letter in the English alphabet with an integer 0 through 25. There’s another mention of UTF-8! But now I need to know what a character encoding is.Īccording to Wikipedia, a character encoding assigns each character to a number. Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode.” “Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something – an integer quantity represented by a sequence of digits, typically – that can be stored or transmitted through a network. It seems reasonable now that one symbol could be made up of multiple characters, just like flag emojis.Ī little further down the Wikipedia article on characters, there’s a section called Encoding that explains: The symbols that we see in a string can be made up of multiple 8-bit (1 byte) UTF-8 code units.Ĭharacters are not the same as symbols. A character is one byte of information representing a unit of text. OK! Maybe things are starting to make a little bit more sense. All can be represented with one or more 8-bit code units with UTF-8.” “A character is most commonly assumed to refer to 8 bits (one byte) today. Then, a significant clue to the question about how a string with one symbol can contain two or more characters: using the word "roughly" in a definition makes the definition feel, shall I say, non-definitive.īut the Wikipedia article goes on to explain that the term character has been used historically to "denote a specific number of contiguous bits.” ” character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language. In that article, the definition of a character is a bit more liberal: The second Google result I get is Wikipedia. That definition seems off, especially in light of the US flag example that indicates that a single symbol may be comprised of at least two characters. “ display unit of information equivalent to one alphabetic letter or symbol." In fact, when I googled character computer science, the very first result I got was a link to a Technopedia article that defines a character as: It tends to get conflated with the word symbol, which, to be fair, is a synonym for the word character as it's used in English vernacular. The term character in computer science can be confusing. Or, perhaps more deeply, it makes you question your understanding of the term character. The unnerving thing about these examples is that they imply that you can't tell what characters are in a string just by looking at your screen. □□ Challenge: Can you find any non-emoji strings that look like a single character but actually contain two or more characters? Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
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