size of char type in c#

Question

Just wondering why do we have char type of 2 bytes size in C# (.NET) unlike 1 byte in other programming languages?

Answer 1

A char is unicode in C#, therefore the number of possible characters exceeds 255. So you'll need two bytes.

Extended ASCII for example has a 255-char set, and can therefore be stored in one single byte. That's also the whole purpose of the System.Text.Encoding namespace, as different systems can have different charsets, and char sizes. C# can therefore handle one/four/etc. char bytes, but Unicode UTF-16 is default.

Answer 2

I'm guessing with “other programming languages” you mean C. C has actually two different char types: char and wchar_t. char may be one byte long, wchar_t not necessarily.

In C# (and .NET) for that matter, all character strings are encoded as Unicode in UTF-16. That's why a char in .NET represents a single UTF-16 code unit which may be a code point or half of a surrogate pair (not actually a character, then).