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Java Topic: General medium

Why is char 2 bytes?

Question

Why is char 2 bytes?

Answer

ASCII Code covers 255 characters so, to store a character only 1 byte is needed. Java uses Unicode covering 65536 characters - so 2 bytes needed.

In Java, a character is encoded in UTF-16 which uses 2 bytes, which requires a minimum of 16-bits of storage for each character.