A unit of data eight bits in length.An octet may comprise multiple fields of data or perhaps a small portion of a field and, therefore, does not necessarily bear any relationship to a byte.A byte generally comprises eight (8) bits that represent a letter in an alphabet (e.g., a, A, z, or Z), a diacritical mark (e.g., ~ or `), a single digit number (e.g., 0, 1, 2, or 3), a punctuation mark (e.g., , ., or !), or a control character (e.g., paragraph break, page break, or carriage return). A byte also may be four (4) bits, five (5) bits, 16 bits, or even 32 bits in length. See also
byte.