# Storage Estimation

## Character

How many bits or bytes are there in a character?

<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4850241/how-many-bits-or-bytes-are-there-in-a-character>

It depends what is the character and what encoding it is in:

* An ASCII character in **8-bit ASCII** encoding is 8 bits (**1 byte**), though it can fit in 7 bits.
* An ISO-8895-1 character in ISO-8859-1 encoding is 8 bits (1 byte).
* A Unicode character in **UTF-8** encoding is **between 8 bits (1 byte) and 32 bits (4 bytes)**.
* A Unicode character in UTF-16 encoding is between 16 (2 bytes) and 32 bits (4 bytes), though most of the common characters take 16 bits. This is the encoding used by Windows internally.
* A Unicode character in UTF-32 encoding is always 32 bits (4 bytes).
* An ASCII character in UTF-8 is 8 bits (1 byte), and in UTF-16 - 16 bits.
* The additional (non-ASCII) characters in ISO-8895-1 (0xA0-0xFF) would take 16 bits in UTF-8 and UTF-16.