how are individual characters represented by a computer
Character (computing) Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of digits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. While most character encodings map characters to numbers and/or bit sequences, Morse code instead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length.