Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Characters

It’s tedious for people to work with data in the low-level form of bits. Instead, they prefer to work with decimal digits (0–9), letters (A–Z and a–z), and special symbols (e.g., $, @, %, &, *, (, ), –, +, ", :, ? and /). Digits, letters and special symbols are known as characters. The computer’s character set is the set of all the characters used to write programs and represent data items. Computers process only 1s and 0s, so a computer’s character set represents every character as a pattern of 1s and 0s. Java uses Unicode^® characters that are composed of one, two or four bytes (8, 16 or 32 bits). Unicode contains characters for many of the world’s languages. See Appendix H for more information on Unicode. See Appendix B for more ...