<P> Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, common punctuation marks (such as "." or "-"), and whitespace . The concept also includes control characters, which do not correspond to symbols in a particular natural language, but rather to other bits of information used to process text in one or more languages . Examples of control characters include carriage return or tab, as well as instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text . </P> <P> Characters are typically combined into strings . </P> <P> 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 . Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF - 8 encoding for Unicode . While most character encodings map characters to numbers and / or bit sequences, Morse code instead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length . </P> <P> Historically, the term character has been widely used by industry professionals to refer to an encoded character, often as defined by the programming language or API . Likewise, character set has been widely used to refer to a specific repertoire of characters that have been mapped to specific bit sequences or numerical codes . The term glyph is used to describe a particular visual appearance of a character . Many computer fonts consist of glyphs that are indexed by the numerical code of the corresponding character . </P>

How are individual characters represented by a computer
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