ASCII and UNICODES

Dr. Khursheed Aurangzeb

 ASCII Character Code

 The standard binary code for the alphanumeric

characters is called ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange)

 It uses seven bits to code 128 characters, as shown in

Table 1-5. The seven bits of the code are designated
by B1 through B7, with B7 being the most significant
bit

 Note that the most significant three bits of the code

determine the column of the table and the least
significant four bits the row of the table
 ASCII Character Code

 The letter A, for example, is represented in ASCII as

1000001 (column 100, row 0001)

 The ASCII code contains 94 characters that can be

printed and 34 nonprinting characters used for various
control functions

 The printing characters consist of the 26 uppercase

letters, the 26 lowercase letters, the 10 numerals, and
32 special printable characters such as %, @, and $
ASCII Codes
ASCII Codes Cont’d…
 ASCII Character Code

 ASCII is a 7-bit code, but most computers manipulate an

8-bit quantity as a single unit called a byte
 Therefore, ASCII characters most often are stored one
per byte, with the most significant bit set to 0
 The extra bit is sometimes used for specific purposes,
eg. some printers recognize an additional 128 8-bit
characters, with the most significant bit set to 1 for
enabling printer to produce additional symbols, such as
those from the Greek alphabet or characters with accent
marks as used in languages other than English
 Unicode

 Unicode was developed as an industry standard for

providing a common representation of symbols and
ideographs for the most of the world’s languages
 By providing a standard representation for different
languages, Unicode removes the need to convert
between different character sets and eliminates the
conflicts that arise from using the same numbers for
different character sets
 Unicode provides a unique number called a code point
for each character, as well as a unique name
 Unicode

 There are several standard encodings of the code points

that range from 8 to 32 bits (1 to 4 bytes)

 For example, UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format, where

UCS stands for Universal Character Set) is a variable-length
encoding that uses from 1 to 4 bytes for each code point

 UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding that uses either 2 or 4

bytes for each code point, while UTF-32 is a fixed-length
that uses 4 bytes for every code point
UTF-8 Encoding for Unicode Code Points
 Unicode

 A common notation for referring to a code point is the

characters “U+” followed by the four to six
hexadecimal digits of the code point.
 For example, U+0030 is the character “0”, named
Digit Zero.
 The first 128 code points of Unicode, from U+0000 to
U+007F, correspond to the ASCII characters.
 Unicode currently supports over a million code points
from a hundred scripts worldwide.
 Unicode

 To illustrate the UTF-8 encoding, consider a couple of

examples. The code point U+0054, Latin capital letter T,
“T”, is in the range of U+0000 0000 to U+0000 007F.
 So it would be encoded with one byte with a value of
(01010100)2.
 The code point U+00B1, plus-minus sign, “±”, is in the
range of U+0000 0080 to U+0000 07FFF.
 So, it would be encoded with two bytes with a value of
(11000010 10110001)2.
 Parity Bit

 To detect errors in data communication and

processing, an additional bit is sometimes added
to a binary code word to define its parity

 A parity bit is the extra bit included to make the

total number of 1s in the resulting code word
either even or odd. Eg. Consider following even
and odd parity
 Binary Codes

 As we count up or down using binary codes, the number

of bits that change from one binary value to the next
varies

 This is illustrated by the binary code for the octal digits

on the left in Table 1-7

 As we count from 000 up to 111 and “roll over” to 000,

the number of bits that change between the binary
values ranges from 1 to 3
 Problem with Binary Codes

 For many applications, multiple bit changes as the

circuit counts is not a problem.
 There are applications, however, in which a change
of more than one bit when counting up or down can
cause serious problems.
 This is illustrated by the binary code for the octal
digits in the Table on next slid.
 One such problem is illustrated by an optical shaft-
angle encoder shown in Figure in coming slides

Gray Codes
Optical Shaft-Angle Encoder Gray Codes
 Gray Codes

 The encoder is a disk attached to a rotating shaft for

measurement of the rotational position of the shaft.
 The disk contains areas that are clear for binary 1
and opaque for binary 0.
 An illumination source is placed on one side of the
disk, and optical sensors, one for each of the bits to
be encoded, are placed on the other side of the disk.
 When a clear region lies between the source and a
sensor, the sensor responds to the light with a
binary 1 output.

 Gray Codes

 When an opaque region lies between the

source and the sensor, the sensor responds to
the dark with a binary 0.
 The rotating shaft, however, can be in any
angular position. For example, suppose that
the shaft and disk are positioned so that the
sensors lie right at the boundary between 011
and 100.
 In this case, sensors in positions B2, B1, and
B0 have the light partially blocked.
 Gray Codes

 In such a situation, it is unclear whether the

three sensors will see light or dark.
 As a consequence, each sensor may produce

either a 1 or a 0.
 Thus, the resulting encoded binary number for

a value between 3 and 4 may be 000, 001, 010,

011, 100, 101, 110, or 111.
 Either 011 or 100 will be satisfactory in this

case, but
the other six values are clearly erroneous!
 Gray Codes

 To see the solution to this problem, notice that in

those cases in which only a single bit changes when
going from one value to the next or previous value,
this problem cannot occur.
 For example, if the sensors lie on the boundary
between 2 and 3, the resulting code is either 010 or
011, either of which is satisfactory.
 If we change the encoding of the values 0 through
7 such that only one bit value changes as we count
up or down (including rollover from 7 to 0), then the
encoding will be satisfactory for all positions.