byte

byte

(bIt') n.

1. a quantity of information equal to 8 bits.

2. a unit of information consisting of or containing 8 bits.

3. an 8-bit value considered as a whole number between 0 and 255.

Abbr. B.

BYTE (SAS word)

Function.

byte order mark

n.

1. a code value to indicate that subsequent text data is big-endian or little-endian.

2. in Unicode, the use of the zero width no break space character U+FEFF at the beginning of a text sequence to signal the byte sequence. The reversed code sequence U+FFFE is not a character code in Unicode, so a program that encounters this code knows to reverse the byte order.

byte stream

(bIt' strEm') n.

data organized as a sequence of bytes.