Question: How many bits used by computer to store one character?

Answer:

The number of bits used by a computer to store one character depends on the character encoding scheme being used. The most commonly used character encoding scheme is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which uses 7 bits to represent each character. However, ASCII only supports a limited set of characters, primarily consisting of basic Latin letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and control characters.

With the advent of more comprehensive character sets and internationalization, other encoding schemes like UTF-8 have become prevalent. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding that uses 8 bits (1 byte) for common ASCII characters and expands to multiple bytes for characters outside the ASCII range. UTF-8 can represent a vast range of characters from different scripts and languages.

Therefore, in modern computing systems, the most common answer to the question of how many bits are used to store one character would be 8 bits (1 byte) when considering UTF-8 encoding. However, for legacy systems or when dealing with ASCII-only characters, it would be 7 bits. It's important to note that there are other character encoding schemes, such as UTF-16 or UTF-32, that use different bit representations depending on the requirements of the specific encoding.