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ASCII Code

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard that uses 7 bits to represent 128 unique characters, including letters, digits, and control characters. It has been essential for text representation in computing and has evolved into extended versions to accommodate more characters. Despite the rise of Unicode, ASCII remains foundational for programming and data processing due to its compatibility across systems.

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12 views2 pages

ASCII Code

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard that uses 7 bits to represent 128 unique characters, including letters, digits, and control characters. It has been essential for text representation in computing and has evolved into extended versions to accommodate more characters. Despite the rise of Unicode, ASCII remains foundational for programming and data processing due to its compatibility across systems.

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lithinprakashv
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character

encoding standard used in computers and electronic devices to represent text. Developed in the

early 1960s, ASCII assigns numeric values to letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control

characters, making it possible for machines to exchange and display textual data.

The ASCII standard uses 7 bits to represent each character, allowing for 128 unique values. These

include uppercase and lowercase English letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), punctuation marks, and

control characters like carriage return (CR), line feed (LF), and tab. For example, the ASCII code for

uppercase 'A' is 65, while lowercase 'a' is 97. The digits '0' to '9' are represented by codes 48 to 57.

Control characters in ASCII are non-printable and are used to control peripheral devices like printers

or manage text formatting. For example, ASCII code 10 represents a line feed, which moves the

cursor to the next line. ASCII has been crucial in the development of programming languages,

operating systems, and communication protocols.

Over time, extended versions of ASCII have been developed to include more characters, such as

accented letters and graphical symbols. These versions use 8 bits, extending the character set to

256 symbols. The most common of these is ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), which supports many Western

European languages.

Despite the advent of Unicode, which provides a much larger character set to accommodate global

languages, ASCII remains the foundation of modern text encoding. It ensures compatibility across

different systems and is widely used in programming, data processing, and internet protocols.

In programming, ASCII values are often used in conditions and loops to manipulate strings and

characters. Languages like C, Python, and Java support functions that convert between characters

and their ASCII values. For example, the `ord()` function in Python returns the ASCII value of a
character.

To summarize, ASCII is a fundamental standard in computing that enables consistent and

interoperable text representation. Its simplicity and widespread adoption have made it a cornerstone

of digital communication and software development.

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