char (Java)

Unlike the char data types in some other languages which are 8 bits (and are intended to store a single character in a 7 or 8 bit character encoding such as ASCII or ISO 8859-1), the char type in the Java language contains 16 bits. It is designed to accommodate Unicode characters coded in UCS2, where a large range of characters (the "basic plane") will fit in a single char variable, while some other characters take two char values in an array.