What Is American Standard for Information Interchange (ASCII)?

ASCII is like the alphabet. It's how we all talk to each other and make friends, just like how you can use it to talk to your friends with words like "hello" or "bye. " it's also a bit like an order at a restaurant: if you're not paying attention, you might end up with something you didn't want! The English alphabetic sequence is the foundation for the American Standard for Information Interchange (ASCII) character encoding scheme. ASCII characters are divided into printable and nonprintable subsets. Regular characters represent alphabetic characters, whereas nonprintable characters represent keyboard keys such as backspace, delete, and return. ASCII is a standard for encoding text characters. It's been around since the 1960s, and, as you may have guessed, it only uses 7 bits (or 128 characters). The first 32 characters are control characters, meaning they're used to control things like how much data is transmitted and how it's formatted. The other 96 characters represent alphabetical characters, numerals, and punctuation marks. The order of these 96 characters was chosen to be compatible with computers made in the United States (though these days we use different machines). As you probably already know, ASCII is not an encoding scheme that works well for languages other than English because of its limited character set. ASCII is like a bike: it's fun to ride, but you'll need more than one gear. The original ASCII standard was designed for computers with 8-bit bytes, which made it possible to use only 128 characters. Now that we've got computers with 16-bit bytes and even 32-bit bytes, there are more than 256 different characters in the world, and you can bet that your computer has a way of representing every one of them. So if you see an ASCII code above 128, don't get confused: it's not ASCII. It's just an extended ASCII character that your computer uses behind the scenes to ensure everything works properly.