What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numeric codes to characters. Each character has a unique number from 0 to 127, making it possible to represent text as numbers for computer processing.
Common Use Cases
- Data Transmission: Send text data as numeric codes
- Programming: Work with character codes in code
- Encryption: Use ASCII codes as part of encryption algorithms
- Data Analysis: Analyze text patterns using numeric values
- Protocol Development: Define communication protocols
- Education: Learn about character encoding
ASCII Code Ranges
- 0-31: Control characters (non-printable)
- 32: Space
- 33-47: Special characters (!, ", #, etc.)
- 48-57: Digits (0-9)
- 58-64: Special characters (:, ;, <, =, etc.)
- 65-90: Uppercase letters (A-Z)
- 91-96: Special characters ([, \, ], etc.)
- 97-122: Lowercase letters (a-z)
- 123-126: Special characters ({, |, }, ~)
- 127: Delete (control character)
Examples
Text: Hello
ASCII: 72 101 108 108 111
Text: ABC
ASCII: 65 66 67
Text: 123
ASCII: 49 50 51
Important Notes
- ASCII only covers English characters and basic symbols
- For international characters, use Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16)
- ASCII codes 0-127 are identical in Unicode
- Extended ASCII (128-255) varies by encoding
- Modern systems typically use UTF-8 which includes ASCII