ASCII Character Encoding
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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) Character Encoding is a method of representing text Characters using a unique numerical Code, known as an ASCII Code or Code Point. This Encoding system was developed in the 1960s and has since become the de facto Standard for text communication.
History
The Development of ASCII began in 1963 by Donald Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The initial version of the ASCII Character Set consisted of only 128 codes, representing Characters from the Latin Alphabet. Over time, the Encoding system grew to include additional Characters, such as Punctuation marks and Symbols.
Character Set
The modern ASCII Character Set consists of 256 codes, divided into three sets:
- ** Printable Characters** (0-127): These are Characters that can be safely represented in a text file without causing any issues.
- Control Characters (128-147): These Control the flow of data between devices and computers.
- Superscript Characters (171-173, 2194-2196, 2281-2295): These are special Characters that represent mathematical functions or other symbolic representations.
Representation
ASCII codes are represented as a pair of hexadecimal values, with the first value being the Code Point and the second value being the Character represented by that Code Point. For example: