The ASCII character set, also known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a standard character encoding scheme used in computer systems and communication devices to represent text and symbols as binary codes. It is one of the most widely used character encoding sets and serves as the foundation for many other character encoding schemes.
The ASCII character set consists of 128 characters, each represented by a unique 7-bit binary code. These characters include uppercase and lowercase letters (A-Z, a-z), numbers (0-9), punctuation marks, special characters, and control characters. The ASCII codes range from 0 to 127, with each character having a specific code value.
The ASCII character set provides a standardized way for computers and devices from different manufacturers to communicate and interpret text. By assigning a unique binary code to each character, ASCII enables the representation and transmission of characters in a consistent manner.
With the advent of extended character sets and Unicode, the ASCII character set has become somewhat limited in its ability to represent characters from different languages and scripts. However, it remains a fundamental building block for text representation in computer systems and forms the basis for compatibility with legacy systems and protocols.
In summary, the ASCII character set is a standardized collection of 128 characters represented by unique 7-bit binary codes. It serves as a fundamental encoding scheme for representing text and symbols in computer systems and communication devices.
