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ASCII reserves the first 32 code points (numbers 0–31 decimal) and the last one (number 127 decimal) for control characters. These are codes intended to control peripheral devices (such as printers ), or to provide meta-information about data streams, such as those stored on magnetic tape.
Punched tape with the word "Wikipedia" encoded in ASCII.Presence and absence of a hole represents 1 and 0, respectively; for example, W is encoded as 1010111.. Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. [1]
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.
On a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system, many special characters that have decimal equivalent codepoint numbers below 256 can be typed in by using the keyboard's Alt+decimal equivalent code numbers keys. For example, the character é (Small e with acute accent, HTML entity code é) can be obtained by pressing Alt+1 3 0.
In HTML and XML, a numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format: &#xhhhh;. or &#nnnn; where the x must be lowercase in XML documents, hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form, and nnnn is the code point in decimal form.
For codes from 0 to 127, the original 7-bit ASCII standard set, most of these characters can be used without a character reference. Codes from 160 to 255 can all be created using character entity names. Only a few higher-numbered codes can be created using entity names, but all can be created by decimal number character reference.
In the ASCII standard, the numbers 0-31 and 127 are assigned to control characters, for instance, code point 7 is typed by Ctrl+G. While some (most?) applications would insert a bullet character • (code point 7 on code page 437), some would treat this identical to Ctrl+G which often was a command for the program. [citation needed]
Character references that are based on the referenced character's UCS or Unicode code point are called numeric character references. In HTML 4 and in all versions of XHTML and XML, the code point can be expressed either as a decimal (base 10) number or as a hexadecimal (base 16) number.