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How many characters can be represented by one 8-bit byte for example?

In: Computer Terminology [Edit categories]

Answer:

For Latin-based alphabets, normally one.

The English alphabet and some special characters (period, comma, newline etc.) fits into 7 bits
Most European alphabets (French, Swedish etc.) plus some more special characters (inverted quotes, copyright/euro/pound/yen symbols etc.) fit into 8 bits
Non-Latin languages like Russian, Hebrew, Chinese etc. may need two, three or four bytes (16-32 bits) per character or symbol.

To some extent the number of bits per character depends on the character encoding, the numbers above are based on US-ASCII (USA), ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe) and UTF-8 (global), arguably the most common encodings.

First answer by J-g-faustus. Last edit by J-g-faustus. Contributor trust: 44 [recommend contributor ]. Question popularity: 1 [recommend question].

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Relevant answers:

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