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'''ASCII''' is a common historical [[character encoding]], designed to represent US English text in digital form. The acronym stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Most of the character encodings in common current use are [[proper superset]]s of ASCII: these include the [[ISO 8859]] family of encodings, the [[Windows 1252]] code page and the [[UTF-8]] encoding of the [[Unicode]] character set.
'''ASCII''' is a common historical [[character encoding]], designed to represent US English text in digital form. The acronym stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Most of the character encodings in common current use are [[proper superset]]s of ASCII: these include the [[ISO 8859]] family of encodings, the [[Windows 1252]] code page and the [[UTF-8]] encoding of the [[Unicode]] character set.
Each character is assigned a number from 0 to 127, encoded in [[binary]]. In addition to the 26 letters of the [[Alphabet#English_Alphabet|English alphabet]] in upper and lower case and all ten digits, many common punctuation symbols are assigned codes, as are [[control characters]], such as backspace, carriage return and linefeed.
Each character is assigned a number from 0 to 127, encoded in [[binary]]. In addition to the 26 letters of the [[Alphabet#English Alphabet|English alphabet]] in upper and lower case and all ten digits, many common punctuation symbols are assigned codes, as are [[control characters]], such as backspace, carriage return and linefeed.
Because there are 128 separate codes, each ASCII character can be represented by 7 [[bit]]s. Since one byte (8 bits) is allocated for each character, this leaves room for one [[checksum]] digit to guarantee that the character has not been corrupted in transmission or storage.
Because there are 128 separate codes, each ASCII character can be represented by 7 [[bit]]s. Since one byte (8 bits) is allocated for each character, this leaves room for one [[checksum]] digit to guarantee that the character has not been corrupted in transmission or storage.