ASCII

Term added on Friday 14th June, 2024 by Team

ASCII, or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard used for representing text and control characters in computers and other devices that use text. Here are some key points about ASCII:

1. Character Set: ASCII includes 128 characters:

33 control characters (ranging from 0 to 31 and 127).
94 printable characters (ranging from 32 to 126).

2. Control Characters: These are non-printable characters that control text processing, such as:

`NUL` (null, 0)
`LF` (line feed, 10)
`CR` (carriage return, 13)
`ESC` (escape, 27)
`DEL` (delete, 127)

3. Printable Characters: These include:

Digits (`0-9`, 48-57)
Uppercase letters (`A-Z`, 65-90)
Lowercase letters (`a-z`, 97-122)
Punctuation marks and symbols (32-47, 58-64, 91-96, 123-126)

4. Usage: ASCII is widely used in programming, data formats, network protocols, and file systems due to its simplicity and efficiency.

Here’s a simple example of ASCII encoding:

Character `A` has an ASCII value of 65.
Character `a` has an ASCII value of 97.
Character `0` has an ASCII value of 48.

ASCII is fundamental in computer science and digital communication, forming the basis for more complex encoding systems like UTF-8, which is used for encoding text in a wide variety of languages.