Trigraph (computing)

Trigraphs are used in computing for several purposes.

An important use of trigraphs in computing is to represent values that cannot be represented directly.

Some examples of this are:

• Character representations in the C-family of programming languages.
• Mnemonics for machine language instructions.
• Octal or decimal representation of byte values.

In other cases the trigraphs themselves are the subjects, eg.:

• As atoms in data compression.
• As trigrams in text matching.