Answer:
A single character typically requires 8 bits or 1 byte for representation.
Explanation: [No need to read]
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange): ASCII uses 7 bits to represent characters, allowing for a total of 128 unique characters (2^7).
Extended ASCII: Extended ASCII uses 8 bits (1 byte) to represent characters, allowing for 256 unique characters (2^8). This includes the standard ASCII characters plus additional characters for non-English languages and special symbols.
Unicode: Unicode is a character encoding system that can represent characters from virtually all languages and scripts around the world. The most commonly used Unicode encoding, UTF-8, typically uses 8 to 32 bits per character depending on the specific character being encoded. UTF-8 uses variable-length encoding, with common characters such as those in the ASCII set represented using fewer bits (8 bits or 1 byte), while less common characters may require more bits (up to 32 bits or 4 bytes).
Therefore, the number of bits necessary for a single character can range from 7 bits (for ASCII) to potentially 32 bits (for certain Unicode characters in UTF-8).
