Byte orientation refers to forms of data processing

Data processing

Computer data processing is any process that a computer program does to enter data and summarise, analyse or otherwise convert data into usable information. The process may be automated and run on a computer. It involves recording, analysing, sorting, summarising, calculating, disseminating and...

 in which digital data are processed byte

Byte

The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...

wise. For example, communication

Communication

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

 is called byte oriented or character oriented when the transmitted information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

 is grouped into byte

Byte

The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...

s.

The latter term is deprecated, since the notion of character

Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....

has changed. An ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 character fits to one byte (octet

Octet (computing)

An octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as there is no standard for the size of the byte.-Overview:...

) in terms of the amount of information. With the internationalization

Internationalization

In economics, internationalization has been viewed as a process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization or international entrepreneurship...

 of computer software, wide character

Wide character

A wide character is a computer character datatype that generally has a size greater than the traditional 8-bit character. The increased datatype size allows for the use of larger coded character sets.-History:...

s became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 characters can be 8, 16, or 32 bits long, i.e., 1, 2, or 4 bytes.

Byte oriented transmission makes use of byte-oriented protocol

Byte-oriented protocol

Byte-oriented framing protocol is similar to bit-oriented protocol except that instead of viewing the frame as a collection of bits, byte-oriented framing views the frame as a collection of bytes. For example UART communication is byte oriented....

s, that may involve transmission of additional bits as terminators, means of error recovery, etc.

Another approaches, alternative to byte oriented, are bit oriented (this opposition resemble a distinction of binary

Binary file

A binary file is a computer file which may contain any type of data, encoded in binary form for computer storage and processing purposes; for example, computer document files containing formatted text...

 and text file

Text file

A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...

s) and word oriented.

See also

• Word orientation
• Byte stream
  Byte stream
  In computer science, a byte stream is a bit stream, in which data bits are grouped into units, called bytes.In computer networking the term octet stream is sometimes used to refer to the same thing; it emphasizes the use of bytes having the length of 8 bits, known as octets.Formally, a byte stream...
  
  
• Byte-oriented protocol
  Byte-oriented protocol
  Byte-oriented framing protocol is similar to bit-oriented protocol except that instead of viewing the frame as a collection of bits, byte-oriented framing views the frame as a collection of bytes. For example UART communication is byte oriented....
  
  
• Byte Stream Protocol