In computer science, a character is a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark or some other similar symbol. Since computers can only process numbers, number codes are used to represent characters, which is known as character encoding. A character encoding system establishes a bijection between the elements of an alphabet of a certain size n and integers from 0 to n−1. Some well known character encoding systems include American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), which has an alphabet size 128, and the extended ASCII, which has an alphabet size 256.