What is the difference between byte and char in Java?

The byte and char are two numeric data types in Java and both can represent integral numbers in a range but there are very different from each other. The main difference between a byte and char data type is that byte is used to store raw binary data while other is used to store characters or text data. You can store character literal into a char variable e.g. char a = 'a'; A character literal is enclosed in single quotes. In terms of range, a byte variable can hold any value from -128 to 127 but a char variable can hold any value between 0 and 255. Another difference between byte and char in Java is that the size of the byte variable is 8 bit while the size of the char variable is 16 bit. One more difference between char and byte is that byte can represent negative values as well but char can only represent positive values as its range is from -128 to 127. In other words, a byte is a signed data type where the first byte represent the sign of number i.e. 0 for positive and 1 for a negative number, but char data type is unsigned. Let's see some more differences between byte and char in Java.

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