Character (computing)

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For computers, a character is a letter, number, or punctuation mark that can be shown on a screen, or printed. There are also some unseen characters, called control characters. An example of a control character is the carriage return or line feed that tells the software to start a new line. A glyph is the shape of the character that is seen when put on screen or on paper.

Since computers only use numbers, they use number codes to represent characters. For example, in ASCII, the number 65 represents the letter 'A'. The computer knows, when working in ASCII, to put the glyph for 'A' on the screen when it sees the number 65. The glyph can change shape slightly depending on the font that is used, if it is bold or in italics, etc. But it is still stored as a 65 in the computer, that does not change.