Character (computing) of the “basic execution character set” and (in newer C standards) UTF-8 code units which implies a minimum size of 8 bits. The exact number of bits can be checked via codice_2 macro. By far the most common size is 8 bits, and the POSIX standard "requires" it to be 8 bits. Since Unicode requires at least 21 bits to store a single code point, it is usually impossible to store one inside a single codice_1; instead a variable-length encoding such as UTF-8 must be used. Unfortunately, the fact that a character was historically stored in a single byte led
Byte order mark as a byte sequence in various encodings and how those sequences might appear in a text editor that is interpreting each byte as a legacy encoding (CP1252 and caret notation for the C0 controls): Byte order mark The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise