Beginning Java 9 Fundamentals: Arrays, Objects, Modules, JShell, and Regular Expressions

Appendix A: Character Encodings

A character is the basic unit of a writing system, for example, a letter of the English alphabet, and an ideograph of an ideographic writing system such as Chinese and Japanese ideographs. In the written form, a character is identified by its shape, also known as glyph . The identification of a character with its shape is not precise. It depends on many factors, for example, a hyphen is identified as a minus sign in a mathematical expression; some Greek and Latin letters have the same shapes, but they are considered different characters in two written scripts. Computers understand only numbers, more precisely, only bits 0 and 1. Therefore, it was necessary to convert, with the advent of computers, the characters ...