class=skin-invert-image|alt=Diagram of String data in computing. Shows the word "example" with each letter in a separate box. The word "String" is above, referring to the entire sentence. The label "Character" is below and points to an individual box.|thumb|A [[string (computer science)|string of seven characters]]

In computing and telecommunications, a character is the encoded representation of a natural language character (including letter, numeral and punctuation), whitespace (space or tab), or a control character (controls computer hardware that consumes character-based data). A sequence of characters is called a string.

Some character encoding systems represent each character using a fixed number of bits whereas other systems use varying sizes. Various fixed-length sizes were used for now obsolete systems such as the six-bit character code,

  • Characters: A Brief Introduction by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
  • ISO/IEC TR 15285:1998 summarizes the ISO/IEC's character model, focusing on terminology definitions and differentiating between characters and glyphs