How much memory does it take to store the letter A?

Answer 1

You can store any of the 127 characters in the ASCII table using just 7 bits. The letter A has character code 65 (0x41) in all ASCII code pages. The code simply maps to the character's glyph in the current code page so you're not actually storing the letter, you are only storing its code.

On most systems, the smallest unit of storage is a byte which is typically 8 bits long. The 8th bit is used to determine whether the character is in the standard ASCII character set (0 to 127) or the extended ASCII character set (128 to 255). Only the standard character set is guaranteed to be the same on all systems (the glyphs may vary in style but always represent the same character). The extended character set varies depending on which code page is current.

If using UNICODE wide-characters, the character code will consume 2 or 4 bytes. On Windows, it is always 2 bytes. But if using multi-byte character encoding or standard ASCII, it is always 1 byte,