Do certain characters take more bytes than others?

Question

I'm not very experienced with lower level things such as howmany bytes a character is. I tried finding out if one character equals one byte, but without success.

I need to set a delimiter used for socket connections between a server and clients. This delimiter has to be as small (in bytes) as possible, to minimize bandwidth.

The current delimiter is "#". Would getting an other delimiter decrease my bandwidth?

Answer 1

It depends on what character encoding you use to translate between characters and bytes (which are not at all the same thing):

• In ASCII or ISO 8859, each character is represented by one byte
• In UTF-32, each character is represented by 4 bytes
• In UTF-8, each character uses between 1 and 4 bytes
• In ISO 2022, it's much more complicated

US-ASCII characters (of whcich # is one) will take only 1 byte in UTF-8, which is the most popular encoding that allows multibyte characters.

Answer 2

It depends on the encoding. In Single-byte character sets such as ANSI and the various ISO8859 character sets it is one byte per character. Some encodings such as UTF8 are variable width where the number of bytes to encode a character depends on the glyph being encoded.