How many bits or bytes are there in a character?
Character EncodingByteCharacter Encoding Problem Overview
How many bits or bytes are there per "character"?
Character Encoding Solutions
Solution 1 - Character Encoding
It depends what is the character and what encoding it is in:
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An ASCII character in 8-bit ASCII encoding is 8 bits (1 byte), though it can fit in 7 bits.
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An ISO-8895-1 character in ISO-8859-1 encoding is 8 bits (1 byte).
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A Unicode character in UTF-8 encoding is between 8 bits (1 byte) and 32 bits (4 bytes).
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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.
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A Unicode character in UTF-32 encoding is always 32 bits (4 bytes).
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An ASCII character in UTF-8 is 8 bits (1 byte), and in UTF-16 - 16 bits.
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The additional (non-ASCII) characters in ISO-8895-1 (0xA0-0xFF) would take 16 bits in UTF-8 and UTF-16.
That would mean that there are between 0.03125 and 0.125 characters in a bit.
Solution 2 - Character Encoding
There are 8 bits in a byte (normally speaking in Windows).
However, if you are dealing with characters, it will depend on the charset/encoding. Unicode character can be 2 or 4 bytes, so that would be 16 or 32 bits, whereas Windows-1252 sometimes incorrectly called ANSI is only 1 bytes so 8 bits.
In Asian version of Windows and some others, the entire system runs in double-byte, so a character is 16 bits.
EDITED
Per Matteo's comment, all contemporary versions of Windows use 16-bits internally per character.