What is ASCII?
ASCII is the most common format for text files in computers and on the Internet. In an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined. UNIX and DOS-based operating systems (except for Windows NT) use ASCII for text files. Windows NT uses a newer code, Unicode. IBM’s System 390 servers use a proprietary 8-bit code called EBCDIC. Conversion programs allow different operating systems to change a file from one code to another. ASCII was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). A chart of ASCII characters and their decimal or hexidecimal equivalent can be found here (courtesy of asciitable.
Don’t get scared by the computer jargon; ASCII (pronounced ASS-key) is just a name for the set of unaccented letters, numbers and other symbols on a standard U.S. keyboard. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a set of common characters, including just about everything that you can type in on an English-language keyboard. It includes the letters A-Z, a-z, space, numbers, punctuation and some basic symbols. Every character in this document is an ASCII character, and each character is identified with a number from 0 through 127 internally in the computer. Just about every computer in the world can show ASCII characters correctly, which makes it ideal for PG’s purpose of providing texts that can be read by anyone, anywhere, but ASCII does not include accented characters, Greek letters, Arabic script and other non-English characters, which causes some problems when we produce texts that need non-ASCII characters.
ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and is pronounced with a hard ‘c’ sound, as ask-ee. As a standard, ASCII was first adopted in 1963 and quickly became widely used throughout the computer world. ASCII is a way of defining a set of characters which can be displayed by a computer on a screen, as well as some control characters which have special functions. Basic ASCII uses seven bits to define each letter, meaning it can have up to 128 specific identifiers, two to the seventh power. This size was chosen based on the common basic block of computing, the byte, which consists of eight bits. The eighth bit was often set aside for error-checking functions, leaving seven remaining for a character set. Thirty-three codes in ASCII are used to represent things other than specific characters. The first 32 (0-31) represent things ranging from a chime sound, to a line feed command, to the start of a header. The final code, 127, represents a backspace. Beyond th
ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a widely used standard for encoding text documents on computers. Usually, a file described as “ASCII” does not contain any special embedded control characters; you can view the contents of the file, change it with an editor, or print it with a printer. In ASCII, every letter, number, and punctuation symbol has a corresponding number, or ASCII code. For example, the character for the number 1 has the code 49, capital letter A has the code 65, and a blank space has the code 32. This encoding system not only lets a computer store a document as a series of numbers, but also lets it share such documents with other computers that use the ASCII system. For a complete list of ASCII codes, see A table of ASCII character codes. Documentation files or program source code files are usually stored as ASCII text. In contrast, binary files, such as executable programs, graphical images, or word processing documents, contain o
