ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used in computing to represent text and control characters. It uses 7 bits to represent each character, allowing for a total of 128 different characters. The ASCII standard includes printable characters, such as letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, as well as control characters for formatting and communication purposes.
ASCII was developed in the 1960s and became widely used as a standard for encoding text in computers and communication systems. Each character in the ASCII encoding is represented by a unique 7-bit binary number. For example, the ASCII code for the letter ‘A’ is 65, ‘B’ is 66, and so on.
Examples:
- ASCII code 65 represents the uppercase letter ‘A’.
- ASCII code 97 represents the lowercase letter ‘a’.
- ASCII code 48 represents the digit ‘0’.
- ASCII code 32 represents the space character.
ASCII has been largely superseded by more comprehensive character encoding standards, such as UTF-8, which can represent a much larger range of characters from different languages and scripts. However, ASCII remains a fundamental encoding standard in many computing systems and is still used for many basic text processing tasks.