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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

A character encoding standard using 7 bits to represent 128 characters including letters, numbers, and symbols.

Character EncodingAlso called: "ascii encoding", "ascii characters"

ASCII established the foundation for text representation in computers.

Character ranges

  • 0-31: Control characters (newline, tab, escape).
  • 32-47: Punctuation and symbols (space, !, ", #, $, %, &).
  • 48-57: Digits (0-9).
  • 58-64: More punctuation (: ; < = > ? @).
  • 65-90: Uppercase letters (A-Z).
  • 91-96: Brackets and symbols ([ \ ] ^ _ `).
  • 97-122: Lowercase letters (a-z).
  • 123-127: More symbols ({ | } ~, DEL).

Extended ASCII

  • 8-bit encoding (256 characters).
  • Includes accented characters and symbols.
  • Not standardized (many code pages exist).

Successors

  • UTF-8: Backward compatible with ASCII, supports all Unicode.
  • UTF-16: Used in Windows and Java.
  • Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1): First 256 Unicode characters.

Common uses

  • Text files and protocols.
  • Programming language source code.
  • Network communication.
  • Command-line interfaces.

Related Tools

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