Chapter 5. Character Representation

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Although computers are famous for their “number-crunching” capabilities, the truth is that most computer systems process character data far more often than numbers. Given the importance of character manipulation in modern software, a thorough understanding of character and string data is necessary if you’re going to write great code.

The term character refers to a human or machine-readable symbol that is typically a nonnumeric entity. In general, a character is any symbol that you can type on a keyboard or display on a video display. Note that in addition to alphabetic characters, character data includes punctuation ...

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