character

See: trait.

1. A letter (e.g., a, b, c, or d), digit (e.g., 1, 2, or 3), or special graphic symbol (e.g., *, |, or -) treated as a single unit of data.
2. A data type for an attribute designating that values for the attribute will be represented using characters. For example, the character data type would be appropriate for the attribute COUNTRY, if the values assigned are like United States, Brazil, Canada, Thailand, and so on.

A small integer representative of a unit of orthography. Historically, characters were usually stored as fixed-width integers (typically in a byte, or maybe two, depending on the character set), but with the advent of UTF-8, characters are often stored in a variable number of bytes depending on the size of the integer that represents the character. Perl manages this transparently for you, for the most part.

A letter, digit, or other symbol that is used as part of the organization, control, or representation of data. 2. One of the units of an alphabet.