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What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard for computers that was developed in the early 1960s. It is a widely used character encoding system that assigns unique numeric codes to represent letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and special symbols, making it possible for different computers and devices to exchange and interpret text data. The ASCII standard includes a total of 128 characters, including control characters such as line feed and carriage return.
ASCII Characters
ASCII characters can be broadly categorized as follows:
1. Control Characters: These characters do not represent visible symbols but serve specific functions in controlling the appearance and behavior of text. Examples include the line feed (LF), carriage return (CR), and tab (TAB) characters.
2. Printable Characters: These characters represent visible symbols and can be displayed directly in text. They include the letters from A to Z (both uppercase and lowercase), numbers from 0 to 9, punctuation marks, and some special symbols such as the dollar sign and percent sign.
3. Extended ASCII Characters: In addition to the standard ASCII characters, some character sets include an extended ASCII range that allows for the representation of additional characters. These include accented letters, currency symbols, and other special characters specific to certain languages and regions.
Character Encoding on Computers
Character encoding is the method used to represent characters digitally. Computers use binary code, rather than characters, to store and process data. Character encoding allows computers to map these binary codes to actual characters for display and interpretation.
ASCII encoding assigns a unique 7-bit binary code to each character, which means it can represent a total of 128 characters. This originally caused limitations for languages with characters beyond this range. To address this, different character encoding systems have been developed, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16, which can represent a much broader range of characters, including those from non-Latin scripts, like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.
Conclusion
Understanding ASCII and ASCII characters is fundamental knowledge for anyone working with computers and computer programming. It provides the basis for character encoding and allows for the accurate exchange and interpretation of text data. While ASCII itself has limitations in representing characters from various languages, modern character encoding systems like UTF-8 have overcome these limitations and become the standard in today’s interconnected world.
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