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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, 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, an ASCII character can be represented by a [[signed char]] type in the [[C]] programming language.

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.

 

An ASCII character can be represented by a [[signed char]] type in the [[C]] programming language.

 

*[http://www.asciitable.com/ The complete ASCII code].  Note that this table gives the [[hexadecimal]] values for the characters ''without'' a checksum digit; the hexadecimal values actually stored are almost always different.

[[Category:Information technology]]

[[Category:Information technology]]