ASCII

ASCII abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of technical limitations of computer systems at the time it was invented, ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limited its scope. Many computer systems instead use Unicode, which has millions of code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as the ASCII set.

Extensions :

• Unicode
• ISO/ICE 8859 (series)
• KOI - 8
• OEM (series)
• Windows - 125x (series)

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding. ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones.

Work on the ASCII standard began in May 1961, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963 underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986.The use of ASCII format for Network Interchange was described in 1969.That document was formally elevated to an Internet Standard in 2015.Ninety-five of the encoded characters are printable: these include the digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and punctuation symbols. In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes.

Example :

lowercase 'i' would be represented in the ASCII encoding by binary 1101001 = hexadecimal 69 (i is the ninth letter) = decimal 105.