What is ASCII: History, Code Examples

 ASCII words may be familiar to some people, they know that these words are related to computers. Although the word ASCII seems cryptic, it has many uses on the internet. This time we will discuss what ASCII is, and what is it used for?

What is ASCII?

ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is the most common format for text files on computers and on the Internet developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

ASCII code is a 7 bit code because it can represent 2 ^7 = 128 characters. Currently, a total of 95 printable characters are represented by this code including 26 uppercase letters (A – Z), 26 lowercase letters (a – z), 10 numbers (0 – 9), and 33 special characters including mathematical symbols, marks read and space characters.

The most recent development in the field of ASCII codes is the development of 8 bit codes – known as US ASCII-8 or ASCII-8. Since this is an 8 bit code, it can represent 2 ^8 = 256 characters.

History of ASCII

ASCII is sometimes referred to as US-ASCII. This is an American innovation developed in the 1960s. The standard has gone through many revisions, most notably in 1977 and 1986, when ASCII was last updated.

Extensions and variations have built on top of ASCII over the years, mainly to compensate for the fact that it omits many of the characters used, or even required, by languages other than US English. ASCII doesn't even serve the British currency symbol (“£”), although the pound comes in Latin-1, an 8-bit extension developed in the 1980s, which also encodes several other currencies.

ASCII was greatly expanded and replaced by Unicode, a much more comprehensive standard. In 2008, Unicode overtook ASCII in popularity for online use.

What Is ASCII Used For?

Computers don't store characters as characters themselves. There are no pictures of each letter somewhere on your computer's hard drive. Instead, each character is encoded as a series of binary bits: 1 and 0.

For example, the code for the uppercase letter "A" is 01000001. But how does your computer know that 01000001 means the letter "A"?

This is where ASCII comes into play: 01000001 means “A” because ASCII says so. And on what ASCII has to say, the computer industry collectively agrees: They developed the ASCII character encoding standard.

What the character encoding standard does is specify all possible characters, and assign each character as a string of bits.

ASCII Code Example

DEC OCT HEX BIN Symbol Description

0 0 0 00000000 NUL Null char

1 1 1 00000001 SOH Start of Heading

2 2 2 00000010 STX Start of Text

3 3 3 00000011 ETX End of Text

4 4 4 00000100 EOT End of Transmission

5 5 5 00000101 ENQ Inquiry

6 6 6 00000110 ACK Acknowledgment

7 7 7 00000111 BEL Bell

8 10 8 00001000 BS Back Space

9 11 9 00001001 HT Horizontal tab

10 12 0A 00001010 LF Line Feed

11 13 0B 00001011 VT Vertical Tab

12 14 0C 00001100 FF Form Feed

13 15 0D 00001101 CR Carriage Return

14 16 0E 00001110 SO Shift Out / X-On

15 17 0F 00001111 SI Shift In / X-Off

16 20 10 00010000 DLE Data Line Escape

17 21 11 00010001 DC1 Device Control 1 (often XON)

18 22 12 00010010 DC2 Device Control 2

19 23 13 00010011 DC3 Device Control 3 (often. XOFF)

20 24 14 00010100 DC4 Device Control 4

21 25 15 00010101 NAK Negative Acknowledgment

22 26 16 00010110 SYN Synchronous Idle

23 27 17 00010111 ETB End of Transmit Block

24 30 18 00011000 CAN Cancel

25 31 19 00011001 EM End of Medium

26 32 1A 00011010 SUB Substitute

27 33 1B 00011011 ESC Escape

28 34 1C 00011100 FS File Separator

29 35 1D 00011101 GS Group Separator

30 36 1E 00011110 RS Record Separator

31 37 1F 00011111 US Unit Separator

32 40 20 00100000 Space

33 41 21 00100001 ! Exclamation mark

34 42 22 00100010 “ Double quotation marks (or speech marks)

35 43 23 00100011 #Number

36 44 24 00100100 $ Dollars

37 45 25 00100101 % Procenttecken

38 46 26 00100110 & Symbol for “and”

39 47 27 00100111 ' Single quote

40 50 28 00101000 ( Open bracket

41 51 29 00101001 ) Close bracket

42 52 2A 00101010 * Asterisk

43 53 2B 00101011 + Plus

44 54 2C 00101100 , Comma

45 55 2D 00101101 – Hyphen

46 56 2E 00101110 . Point

47 57 2F 00101111 / Slash or divide

48 60 30 00110000 0 Zero

49 61 31 00110001 1 One

50 62 32 00110010 2 Two

51 63 33 00110011 3 Three

52 64 34 00110100 4 Four

53 65 35 00110101 5 Five

54 66 36 00110110 6 Six

55 67 37 00110111 7 Seven

56 70 38 00111000 8 Eight

57 71 39 00111001 9 Nine

58 72 3A 00111010 : Colon

59 73 3B 00111011 ; Semicolon

60 74 3C 00111100 < Less than (or open angle bracket)

61 75 3D 00111101 = Equal to

62 76 3E 00111110 > Greater than (or close square bracket)

63 77 3F 00111111 ? Question mark

64 100 40 01000000 @ At symbol

65 101 41 01000001 A Uppercase A

66 102 42 01000010 B Uppercase B

67 103 43 01000011 C Uppercase C

68 104 44 01000100 D Uppercase D

69 105 45 01000101 E Uppercase E

70 106 46 01000110 F Uppercase F

71 107 47 01000111 G Uppercase G

72 110 48 01001000 H Uppercase H

73 111 49 01001001 I Uppercase I

74 112 4A 01001010 J Uppercase J

75 113 4B 01001011 K Uppercase K

76 114 4C 01001100 L Uppercase L

77 115 4D 01001101 M Uppercase M

78 116 4E 01001110 N Capital letter N

79 117 4F 01001111 O Uppercase O

80 120 50 01010000 P Capital P

81 121 51 01010001 Q Uppercase Q

82 122 52 01010010 R Uppercase R

83 123 53 01010011 S Uppercase S

84 124 54 01010100 T Uppercase T

85 125 55 01010101 U Uppercase U

86 126 56 01010110 V Uppercase V

87 127 57 01010111 W Uppercase W

88 130 58 01011000 X Capital X

89 131 59 01011001 Y Uppercase Y

90 132 5A 01011010 Z Capital letter Z

91 133 5B 01011011 [ Opening bracket

92 134 5C 01011100 \ Backslash

93 135 5D 01011101 ] Cover bracket

94 136 5E 01011110 ^ Caret – circumflex

95 137 5F 01011111 _ Underline

96 140 60 01100000 ` Heavy accent

97 141 61 01100001 a Lower case letter a

98 142 62 01100010 b Lower case b

99 143 63 01100011 c Lower case c

100 144 64 01100100 d Lower case d

101 145 65 01100101 e Lowercase e

102 146 66 01100110 f Lowercase f

103 147 67 01100111 g Lower case g

104 150 68 01101000 h Lowercase h

105 151 69 01101001 i Lowercase i

106 152 6A 01101010 j Lower case j

107 153 6B 01101011 k Lowercase k

108 154 6C 01101100 l Lower case l

109 155 6D 01101101 m Lower case m

110 156 6E 01101110 n Lower case n

111 157 6F 01101111 o Lower case o

112 160 70 01110000 p Lower case p

113 161 71 01110001 q Lower case q

114 162 72 01110010 r Lower case r

115 163 73 01110011 s Lowercase s

116 164 74 01110100 t Lowercase t

117 165 75 01110101 u Lowercase u

118 166 76 01110110 v Lower case v

119 167 77 01110111 w Lowercase letter w

120 170 78 01111000 x Lower case x

121 171 79 01111001 y Lower case y

122 172 7A 01111010 z Lower case z

123 173 7B 01111011 { Opening clamp

124 174 7C 01111100 | Vertical bar

125 175 7D 01111101 } Cover clamp

126 176 7E 01111110 ~ Equal sign – tilde

127 177 7F 01111111 Delete

From the table we can see that the numbers 0 – 9 are represented by binary values with the prefix 0011. In the same way in the case of uppercase letters "P" to "Z" represented by 0101 0000 to 0101 1010, while lowercase letters "p" to " z” is represented by 0111 0000 to 0111 1010.

Conclusion

So what is ASCII? Simply put ASCII is a set of digital codes that represent letters, numbers and other symbols, widely used as a standard format in the transfer of text between computers. Standard ASCII text uses 7-bits to represent characters. Another additional character set uses 8-bit to represent non-English characters.

Now ASCII has been replaced by Unicode characters which can handle a total of 1,112,064 different characters. It can serve tens of thousands of characters in different languages, emoji (almost one and a half thousand) and even extinct writing systems like Jurchen.

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Resa Risyan

Just an ordinary person who wants to share a little knowledge, hopefully the knowledge I provide can be useful for all of us. Keep in mind! Useful knowledge is an investment in the afterlife.