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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.
Files that contain machine-executable code and non-textual data typically contain all 256 possible eight-bit byte values. 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 ...
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 hardware code page of the original IBM PC supplied the following box-drawing characters, in what DOS now calls code page 437. This subset of the Unicode box-drawing characters is thus included in WGL4 and is far more popular and likely to be rendered correctly:
This led to the idea that text in Chinese and other languages would take more space in UTF-8. However, text is only larger if there are more of these code points than 1-byte ASCII code points, and this rarely happens in the real-world documents due to spaces, newlines, digits, punctuation, English words, and (depending on document format) markup.
In some cases, "the representation is not the same as the result of converting an EBCDIC Signed field to ASCII with a translation table." [ 10 ] In other cases they are the same, to maintain source-data compatibility at the loss of the connection between the character code and the corresponding digit.
In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art – for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports. [17] Some electronic schematic archives represent the circuits using ASCII art.