Do certain characters take more bytes than others?
bandwidth, character, character-encoding, delimiter, size
Solution
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.
Problem
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?