<P> With the advent and widespread acceptance of Unicode and bit - agnostic coded character sets, a character is increasingly being seen as a unit of information, independent of any particular visual manifestation . The ISO / IEC 10646 (Unicode) International Standard defines character, or abstract character as "a member of a set of elements used for the organisation, control, or representation of data". Unicode's definition supplements this with explanatory notes that encourage the reader to differentiate between characters, graphemes, and glyphs, among other things . Such differentiation is an instance of the wider theme of the separation of presentation and content . </P> <P> For example, the Hebrew letter aleph ("א") is often used by mathematicians to denote certain kinds of infinity, but it is also used in ordinary Hebrew text . In Unicode, these two uses are considered different characters, and have two different Unicode numerical identifiers ("code points"), though they may be rendered identically . Conversely, the Chinese logogram for water ("水") may have a slightly different appearance in Japanese texts than it does in Chinese texts, and local typefaces may reflect this . But nonetheless in Unicode they are considered the same character, and share the same code point . </P> <P> The Unicode standard also differentiates between these abstract characters and coded characters or encoded characters that have been paired with numeric codes that facilitate their representation in computers . </P> <P> The combining character is also addressed by Unicode . For instance, Unicode allocates a code point to each of i, (") (combining trema) and ï (U + 00ef). This makes it possible to code the middle character of the word naïve both as a single code point' ï' or as a combination of the character i with diacritic (") (U + 0069 LATIN SMALL LETTER I + U + 0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS). </P>

A group of 8 bits to represents a character is known as