American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

by Sonam Singh 04-Mar-19

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A very basic concept i.e. Computer understands only Binary language. To make the computer understand there is a need to integrate code using 0s and 1s. We call each as a bit. We human beings are not comfortable with binary code. Writing binary code is very complex and time-consuming. There required human-readable and simple programs that can execute in every machine. With the rapid development and advanced technologies, each system is developed with different Binary code representation. For that, a set of standards was developed, in which ASCII is one of them. It is an 8-bitcode that acts as a method used for translating computer text into human-readable text.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is applicable for encoding different documents on the system, make use of eight bits to represent a letter or number. In ASC11, every character including numbers, upper case, lower case letters, and punctuation symbols are given a corresponding code for representation. For e.g. 'A' has been given a value i.e. "65" whereas blank space has 32.

Advantages:

a) A Character Encoding Scheme that encodes 128 characters into 7 bits integers and acts asan identification of the keyboard's character, letters, and special characters.

b) Enhance keyboard understand ability. One can easily determine which character to be displayed while pressing the key.

c) Acts as a format for text files for file storage and sharing

d) File Documentation

e) ASCII tables permit computers to read entire written word documents stored in it.

ASCII Characters can be categorized into three sections that are given below:

a) 1 to 31 i.e. Control Codes

b) 32 to 127 i.e. Standard Characters

c) 128 to 255 i.e. Non Standard Characters, Special Symbols, and International Character Sets

Where control codes perform various display control operations instead of displaying symbols.

Standard and non-standard character set consist of various punctuation symbols, special characters, the numeric digits, upper and lower case alphabetic symbols, five additional special symbols, and some other control characters.