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ASCII (/ ˈ æ s k iː / ⓘ ASS-kee), [3]: 6 an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. . ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devic
For example, an ASCII (or extended ASCII) scheme will use a single byte of computer memory, while a UTF-8 scheme will use one or more bytes, depending on the particular character being encoded. Alternative ways to encode character values include specifying an integer value for a code point, such as an ASCII code value or a Unicode code point.
A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the format &#nnnn; or &#xhhhh; where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form.
A code point is a value or position of a character in a coded character set. [10] A code space is the range of numerical values spanned by a coded character set. [10] [12] A code unit is the minimum bit combination that can represent a character in a character encoding (in computer science terms, it is the word size of the character encoding).
In all modern character sets, the null character has a code point value of zero. In most encodings, this is translated to a single code unit with a zero value. For instance, in UTF-8 it is a single zero byte. However, in Modified UTF-8 the null character is encoded as two bytes : 0xC0,0x80. This allows the byte with the value of zero, which is ...
The ASCII text-encoding standard uses 7 bits to encode characters. With this it is possible to encode 128 (i.e. 2 7) unique values (0–127) to represent the alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation characters commonly used in English, plus a selection of Control characters which do not represent printable characters.
Control characters are often rendered into a printable form known as caret notation by printing a caret (^) and then the ASCII character that has a value of the control character plus 64. Control characters generated using letter keys are thus displayed with the upper-case form of the letter.
The code 0x2F is used in EBCDIC. In the programming language C (created in 1972), and in many languages influenced by it such as Python, the bell character can be placed in a string or character constant with \a. 'a' stands for "alert" or "audible" and was chosen because \b was already used for the backspace character. [4]