How many bits in a character

A MIME compliant email program will use the email headers to keep track of which character set and which encoding scheme are applied to each email message. A web browser will do the same. This allows the program to convert and know how to display the characters on any given machine so the entire encoding system is transparent the user doesn't notice to the user.

And these same MIME headers are also used in web pages so that a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox knows how to display each page, no matter where it was created and no matter where it is being viewed. As long as the computer knows which character set is represented, it knows which character to display.

You also have to get the characters into the computer in the first place. Windows and Mac have long allowed this to be done using keyboard shortcuts. The best way to enter characters in Windows is to select a keyboard layout that includes the characters that you want to type. For typing western European languages on American keyboards, the safest bet and the easiest to use if you already know how to type on an American keyboard is the US-International keyboard.

In Windows 7, 8, 10, look for the Keyboards and Languages tab on the Region and Language control panel to change or add keyboards. The unused nibble may be either all 0's or all 1's. This occurs in data transmission where numbers are being transmitted over a communications link.

Packed BCD reduces the amount of time spent transmitting the numbers, as each data byte transmitted results in the sending of two BCD digits.

The computer handles each boolean variable as a single bit. If the bit is TRUE, then is has a value of 1. Consider the case in a program where we need to keep track of the number of minutes a phone line is busy for within the limited range of 0 to This does not require the use of a full integer, so some programming languages allow you to specify the number of bits used to allocate to variables with limited ranges.

The advantage of this approach, is that the storage space of status variables can be combined together into a single 16 or 32 bits, resulting in a saving of space. Consider where a computer allocates 16 bits of storage per status variable. If we had three status variables, the space consumed would be 48 bits. BUT, if all the status variables could be combined and fitted into a single 16 bits of storage, we could save 32 bits of memory. This is very important in real-time systems where memory space is at a premium.

Consider the following diagram, which illustrates the packing of boolean and status variables together into a single byte. Lets now look at the encoding method. The table below shows the bit combinations required for each character. A computer usually stores information in eight bits.

Some systems may use the eight bit to implement graphics or different language symbols, ie, Greek characters. Control codes are used in communications and printers. In English, they are combined with other characters to form words. Examples of characters are;. Also, how many characters is 32 bytes? Numbers are stored on the computer in binary form. In other words, information is encoded as a sequence of 1's and 0's.

On most computers , the memory is organized into 8-bit bytes. This means each 8-bit byte stored in memory will have a separate address. Asked by: Teodorico Lamoso asked in category: General Last Updated: 7th April, How many bits does a computer need to store all the characters? A computer needs 7 bits to store all the characters. This allows for up to characters. Usually the 7 bits are stored in an 8-bit byte, with one bit wasted.

How many bits is a double? Where is ascii stored? ASCII table is not stored anywhere. Programming language have the ability to decode ASCII code for different letters and thus can display them appropriately. ASCII code is just a representation of certain numerical values as text. How many bits is a Boolean? A boolean would be one bit if your cpu was a 1 bit cpu. In general the bit size of a cpu eg 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, etc is a measure of the smallest size of data that can be manipulated by the cpu -- thus it is ALSO the size of the address space.