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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.
Like in C and C++ there are functions that group reusable code. The main difference is that functions, just like in Java, have to reside inside of a class. A function is therefore called a method. A method has a return value, a name and usually some parameters initialized when it is called with some arguments.
ASCII was incorporated into the Unicode (1991) character set as the first 128 symbols, so the 7-bit ASCII characters have the same numeric codes in both sets. This allows UTF-8 to be backward compatible with 7-bit ASCII, as a UTF-8 file containing only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file containing the same sequence of characters.
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 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 ...
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 order to correctly interpret and display text data (sequences of characters) that includes extended codes, hardware and software that reads or receives the text must use the specific extended ASCII encoding that applies to it. Applying the wrong encoding causes irrational substitution of many or all extended characters in the text.
A wide character refers to the size of the datatype in memory. It does not state how each value in a character set is defined. Those values are instead defined using character sets, with UCS and Unicode simply being two common character sets that encode more characters than an 8-bit wide numeric value (255 total) would allow.