(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a widely used that represents characters using 7 s. With ASCII, each character is assigned a unique , ranging from 0 to 127, which is equivalent to the decimal representation of each character. Since ASCII uses only 7 bits, it can represent a limited set of characters, primarily consisting of the English alphabet, numbers, punctuation marks, and control characters.
Character encoding is the process of assigning a unique number (code point) to each character in a . A character set, also known as a character repertoire, is a collection of characters and their corresponding code points. , a character set that aims to encompass all scripts and characters used worldwide, is a widely adopted standard in modern computing. It supports over a million code points, allowing for the representation of various scripts, special symbols, emojis, and more.
To accommodate the vast number of characters, Unicode uses different encoding schemes, such as and . UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding scheme that can represent any Unicode code point using 8, 16, or 32 bits. It is backward compatible with ASCII, as the first 128 code points in UTF-8 maintain the same representation as ASCII. This compatibility ensures that existing ASCII data can be seamlessly interpreted as UTF-8.
When representing characters in their binary form, each character maps to a specific bit pattern. A bit, short for binary digit, is the most basic unit of information in computing. In the context of character encoding, bits are used to represent the different states of a character. For example, in ASCII, each character corresponds to a unique 7-bit pattern. enables computers to understand characters and perform operations on them, such as displaying text, storing data, and manipulating strings.
Keywords
unicode | utf-16 | ascii | binary representation | code point | character encoding | bit | utf-8 | character set |
