Character Sets

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Character Sets Information

ASCII

Key Characteristics:

  • ASCII is the most commonly used character set in the English-speaking world.
  • Each ASCII character is given a 7-bit binary code and it can represnt a total of 128 different characters.
  • Some of these characters include both the upper and lower case letters in the English alphabet, numbers, symbols and commands.
  • An extra bit is added to the start of the binary code for each ASCII character. This is so that each character nicely fits into 1 byte.
ASCII table

Extended ASCII:

  • Extended ASCII uses 8-bit binary codes to represnt 256 characters.
  • The first 128 characters are the exact same as the standard ASCII.
  • The remaining 128 characters represent characters in some other languages like French and German.

Unicode

Key Characteristics:

  • Unicode comes in various forms and tries to cover every possible character, letter and symbol that may be written.
  • Unlike ASCII, Unicode uses multiple bytes per character.
  • The best thing about Unicode is that it covers all commonly used languages even those that use completely different characters like Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Russian.
  • The first 128 characters in Unicode are the exact same as those in ASCII.