ASCII, which stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange," is a character standard that was developed in the early 1960s to represent and control characters in computers and communication equipment. It's one of the building blocks of modern computing and is still widely used today, though it has been largely supplemented by more advanced character encoding standards like UTF-8.
ASCII character encoding assigns a unique number to , numbers, and other printable characters like spaces, commas, and line breaks. ASCII is represented using 7-bit binary, allowing for possible characters, which means it is primarily limited to the English language.
Unicode, on the other hand, is a character encoding standard designed to represent and handle text and symbols from virtually all systems in the world. It provides a unified and consistent way to encode characters and , regardless of language, script, or platform. Unicode assigns a unique number, called a point, to every character, including those in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and many others, as well as emojis. aims to cover all written languages and scripts worldwide, currently defining over code points, with room for expansion.
Unlike ASCII, Unicode can be represented using various bit sizes, depending on the encoding scheme chosen. The most common Unicode encoding scheme, UTF-8, encodes characters using 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits, depending on the specific character being encoded.
