The char Primitive Data Type

Characters are very common in computers. The primitive data type used has the name char to save typing. There are 16 bits used to represent characters using the char type. In many programming languages, only 8 bits are used for this purpose. In Java, 16 bits are used in order to represent characters from human languages other than English. The method used is called Unicode.

For example, here is a 16 bit pattern:

000000000110011

If you know that these 16 bits are of data type char, then you could look in a table and discover that they represent the character 'g'. If you have a really good memory, you might recall that the same 16 bits represent the integer 103 if they are regarded as data type short. Knowing the data type of a pattern is necessary to make sense of it.

Upper and lower case characters are represented by different patterns. Punctuation and special characters are also char data. There are also special characters, like the "space" character that separates words.

Control characters are bit patterns that show the end of a line or where to start pages. Other control characters represent the mechanical activities of old communications equipment (such as teletypes) that are rarely used thesedays, but need to be kept.

Primitive type char represents a SINGLE character. It does not include any font information. When you want to deal with more than one character at a time (almost always), you need to use objects that have been built out of char data.

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