== CHAR type variables ==

**CHAR** (//character//) types are suitable for storing a single letter each. The original CHAR uses codes from the ancient **ASCII** character mapping table. This table contains a mix of 255 different characters (letters, numbers, control characters, graphic symbols). Its advantage is that it requires only 1 byte, but its disadvantage is that the character set is quite limited; for example, Hungarian or Chinese accented characters are mostly excluded.

The extended version of CHAR is **WCHAR** (wide-character), which has a 2-byte length but can be used more broadly with its (**UNICODE**) //UCS-2// mapping. Up to 65,535 character mappings can be encoded with 16 bits; UNICODE does not fully utilize this range.

^Type^Name^Bit^Code table^Value range HEX^Value range DEC^Example|
|CHAR|character|8|ASCII|0 .. FF|0 .. 255|'P', CHAR#'P'|
|WCHAR|Wide character|16|UCS-2|$0000 - $D7FF|0 .. 55.295|WCHAR#'Ő'|