What Are Alpha Characters?

Alpha characters, also known as alphanumeric characters, are developed for computers and consist of 26 alphabetic characters and 10 Arabic numbers. Alpha characters include letter variants for languages other English.

Typically, the specifications of an alphabetic character are determined by its function. Alpha characters are exclusively confined to letters and numbers when naming files. In programming, however, symbols are typically allowed as alpha letters. Depending on the application, several subsets of alpha characters may have been used to prevent human misinterpretation. This can be seen in aeroplane seat maps. The letter “I” is omitted to avoid confusion with the numeral “1.”