character
Let an agent explain characters in computing, relay encodings, standards and issues from text-processing sources, describe the named national standards and the metacharacter, and distinguish a character from a glyph, a grapheme, a byte and a code point.
Research draft, second pass
A second pass drafted this model: the structure a model of this thing needs, and what is known about it in the world. The line under this one says how the second half was obtained - researched against sources, or recalled without web access, in which case nothing here was read anywhere and every claim is a lead to verify. Unreviewed either way.
written by Claude from model knowledge without web access - no source was read, every claim is a lead to verify
Researched by: Claude
Purpose and description
Let an agent explain characters in computing, relay encodings, standards and issues from text-processing sources, describe the named national standards and the metacharacter, and distinguish a character from a glyph, a grapheme, a byte and a code point.
In computing and text, a character is the smallest unit of written language or data, such as a letter, digit, punctuation mark, symbol, space or control code, represented in computers by character encodings that map characters to numbers, from ASCII to Unicode; the registry aliases name characters from national and regional standards such as the Korean KS X 1001 and KS X 1002, North Korean KPS 9566 and KPS 10721 and Chinese GB 12052, and the metacharacter, a character with special meaning in a context such as a regular expression. Encoding mismatches cause garbled text, called mojibake, and Unicode aims to unify encodings.
What it is for: Representing units of text in data.
It can be explain encodings; relay standards; describe named standards; relay encoding issues.
Distinguishing features
Unit of text
Encoded as numbers
Many standards
Metacharacters have special meaning
What it looks like
Not a physical object; letters, digits and symbols and their numeric codes.
Physical character
ASCII: 1963 year - 7-bit encoding
Unicode: over 140,000 characters note - check current
registry parents: data, ordinal data type note
How it is recognised
Smallest unit of text or data
KS X 1001 character, KS X 1002 character, KPS 9566 character, KPS 10721 character, GB 12052 character, metacharacter
A glyph is a visual shape; a grapheme is a writing-system unit; a byte is 8 bits; a code point is a number in an encoding
Related models
is a kind of - in registry terms
is encoded by -
is contrasted with -
is contrasted with -
In practice
Families and kinds
letters and digits
punctuation and symbols
control characters
metacharacters
Standards and regulation
Unicode standard
ISO/IEC 10646
National character set standards
Failure modes and hazards
Mojibake from encoding mismatches
Confusing characters, glyphs and code points
Security issues from homoglyphs
Also called
Where this came from
wikidata · CC0 1.0
Also registered as vr.tr.character-3
Drafted structure
Bundle to layer to finding to question, as the second pass will find it: 4 bundles · 8 layers · 8 findings · 16 questions.
Understand What a character is.
Science.
Definition
Definition.
Definition
Definition.
- What is a character in computing, and how does it differ from a glyph, grapheme, byte and code point? definition
- Is the question about encodings, garbled text or regular expressions? boundary
Standards
Named standards.
Standards
Standards.
- What are the KS X, KPS and GB character standards and the metacharacter? definition
- Which entry fits the specific standard? action
Encoding Encoding.
Science.
ASCII
ASCII to Unicode.
ASCII
ASCII.
- How did encodings develop from ASCII to Unicode? provenance
- Which references are standard? provenance
Code points
Code points and encodings.
Code points
Code points.
- How do code points, UTF-8 and UTF-16 relate? provenance
- Which sources are cited? provenance
Issues Issues.
Regulation.
Mojibake
Garbled text.
Mojibake
Mojibake.
- Why do encoding mismatches produce mojibake? provenance
- Which entry fits mojibake? action
Security
Homoglyph attacks.
Security
Security.
- How are look-alike characters used in spoofing attacks? provenance
- Is the information current? boundary
Context Text processing.
Science.
Regex
Metacharacters.
Regex
Regex.
- How do metacharacters work in regular expressions? provenance
- Which entry fits regular expression? action
Graphemes
Graphemes and glyphs.
Graphemes
Graphemes.
- How do graphemes and glyphs differ from characters? provenance
- Is the information accurate? boundary
What the second pass must settle
- Should national character sets be linked as standards?
- Should the metacharacter be a separate entry?
- How should Unicode versions be tracked?