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Many computer programs came to rely on this distinction between seven-bit text and eight-bit binary data, and would not function properly if non-ASCII characters appeared in data that was expected to include only ASCII text. For example, if the value of the eighth bit is not preserved, the program might interpret a byte value above 127 as a ...
In the table below, the column "ISO 8859-1" shows how the file signature appears when interpreted as text in the common ISO 8859-1 encoding, with unprintable characters represented as the control code abbreviation or symbol, or codepage 1252 character where available, or a box otherwise. In some cases the space character is shown as ␠.
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).
The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending of other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning, an "escape sequence". This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning ...
The binary code assigns a pattern of binary digits, also known as bits, to each character, instruction, etc. For example, a binary string of eight bits (which is also called a byte) can represent any of 256 possible values and can, therefore, represent a wide variety of different items. In computing and telecommunications, binary codes are used ...
A character is encoded as 1 or 2 bytes. A byte in the range 00–7F is a single byte that means the same thing as it does in ASCII. Strictly speaking, there are 95 characters and 33 control codes in this range. A byte with the high bit set indicates that it is the first of 2 bytes.
For example, \11 is an octal escape sequence denoting a byte with decimal value 9 (11 in octal). However, \1111 is the octal escape sequence \111 followed by the digit 1 . In order to denote the byte with numerical value 1, followed by the digit 1 , one could use "\1""1" , since C concatenates adjacent string literals.
In 1973, ECMA-35 and ISO 2022 [18] attempted to define a method so an 8-bit "extended ASCII" code could be converted to a corresponding 7-bit code, and vice versa. [19] In a 7-bit environment, the Shift Out would change the meaning of the 96 bytes 0x20 through 0x7F [a] [21] (i.e. all but the C0 control codes), to be the characters that an 8-bit environment would print if it used the same code ...