What's inside a character device file?

A character device file is a special linux file where you can read from and write to an infinite number of chars and other file operations that you can define inside a kernel device driver.
But does this file actually exist? If we look at it as normal text file is it possible to read the contents that are inside? Like major, minor numbers? Something similar we have with soft links. On linux machine the link is actually a path in system, but after committing it to git for example we see only "normal" text file with one string, a path to source directory.