Computing groups of Hecke characters

We describe algorithms to represent and compute groups of Hecke characters. We make use of an idèlic point of view and obtain the whole family of such characters, including transcendental ones. We also show how to isolate the algebraic characters, which are of particular interest in number theory. This work has been implemented in Pari/GP, and we illustrate our work with a variety of explicit examples using our implementation.