A byte is a unit of measurement of information storage, commonly composed of eight bits. If composed of eight bits, a single byte can hold one of 256 (2^8) values.

Numerical data can be represented in a single byte or a combination of bytes.

Textual data is represented as a sequence of codes which represent each character, and it is common to for each character to be represented by one byte. A coding standard often used is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) which provides codes for 128 characters. For example, the ASCII code for character h has a value of 104 which can be represented in a byte.