ASCII Character Set

ASCII Character Set

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers and other devices that use text. It was initially developed in the early 1960s and has since become one of the fundamental building blocks of modern computing.

Here are some key points about ASCII characters:

1. Character Set: ASCII defines a set of 128 characters, including 33 control characters (such as newline and tab) and 95 printable characters (letters, digits, punctuation marks, and symbols).
2. 7-Bit Encoding: Each ASCII character is represented using 7 bits, allowing for a total of 128 different characters (2^7 = 128). The eighth bit is not used in ASCII, which limits it to a total of 128 characters.
3. Character Encoding: Each ASCII character is assigned a unique numeric value between 0 and 127. These values are often represented in decimal, octal, hexadecimal, or binary notation.
4. Character Representation: ASCII characters can be represented in various ways, including as characters themselves (e.g., ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘1’, ‘!’, etc.), numeric values (e.g., 65 for ‘A’), or escape sequences (e.g., “\n” for newline).
5. Usage: ASCII is widely used in computer systems and networks for encoding text data. It is supported by virtually all modern computing devices and is used in communication protocols, file formats, programming languages, and more.
6. Extended ASCII: While the original ASCII standard defines 128 characters, various extended ASCII encodings have been developed to support additional characters (typically 256 characters in total) by using the eighth bit. These extended ASCII sets vary depending on specific implementations and language requirements.
7. Compatibility: ASCII remains relevant today, especially for basic text encoding and communication. However, it has limitations, particularly in handling non-English languages and special characters. For internationalization and broader character support, other encoding standards like UTF-8 have become more prevalent.

ASCII control characters (character code 0-31)

The first 32 characters in the ASCII Character Set are unprintable control codes and are used to control peripherals such as printers.

ASCII printable characters (character code 32-127)

Codes 32-127 are common for all the different variations of the ASCII Character Set, they are called printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few miscellaneous symbols. You will find almost every character on your keyboard. Character 127 represents the command DEL.

The extended ASCII codes (character code 128-255)

There are several different variations of the 8-bit ASCII Character Set. The table below is according to Windows-1252 (CP-1252) which is a superset of ISO 8859-1, also called ISO Latin-1, in terms of printable characters, but differs from the IANA’s ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 128 to 159 range. Characters that differ from ISO-8859-1 is marked by light blue color.

The ASCII character set, with its 128 characters, forms the foundation of text representation in computing, enabling communication and data exchange across diverse systems.

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