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copied!<p>In C, a <code>char</code> is a type of integer, and it's most typically one byte wide. One byte is 8 bits so that's 2 to the power 8, or 256, possible values (as noted in another answer).</p> <p>In other languages, a 'character' is a completely different thing from an integer (as it should be), and has to be explicitly encoded to turn it into a byte. Java, for example, makes this relatively simple by storing characters internally in a UTF-16 encoding (forgive me some details), so they take up 16 bits, but that's just implementation detail. Different encodings such as UTF-8 mean that a character, when encoded for transmission, could occupy anything from one to four bytes.</p> <p>Thus your question is slighly malformed (which is to say it's actually several distinct questions in one).</p> <p>How many values can a byte have? 256.</p> <p>What characters can be sent in emails? Mostly those ASCII characters from space (32) to tilde (126).</p> <p>What bytes can be sent over the internet? Any you like, as long as you encode them for transmission.</p> <p>What can be cut-and-pasted? If your platform can do Unicode, then all of unicode; if not, not.</p> <p>Does UTF-8 make a difference? UTF-8 is a standard way of encoding a string of characters into a string of bytes, and probably not much to do with your question (Joel Spolsky has a <em>very</em> good account of <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)</a>).</p> <p>So pick a question!</p> <p><strong>Edit, following edit to question</strong> Aha! If the question is: 'how do I encode data in such a way that it can be mailed?', then the answer is probably 'Use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64" rel="nofollow noreferrer">base64</a>'. That is, if you have some purely binary format for your levels, then base64 is the 'standard' (very much quotes-standard) way of encoding that binary blob in a way that will make it through mail. The things you want to google for are 'serialization' and 'deserialization'. Base64 is probably close to the practical maximum of information-per-mailable-character.</p> <p>(Another answer is 'use XML', but the question seems to imply some preference for compactness, and that a basically binary format is desirable).</p>

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