ASCII code
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers and other devices that use digital communication. It assigns a unique numerical value (code point) to each character, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. ASCII was developed in the early 1960s and has since become a widely used character encoding scheme.

Table of Contents
Key features of ASCII include:
- Character Set: ASCII defines a 7-bit character set, comprising 128 characters encoded using 7 bits. This includes 95 printable characters (letters, digits, and symbols) and 33 control characters (such as carriage return, line feed, and tab).
- Numeric Representation: Each character in the ASCII character set is represented by a unique numeric value ranging from 0 to 127 (decimal) or 0x00 to 0x7F (hexadecimal).
- Compatibility: ASCII is compatible with many legacy systems, making it widely adopted in early computer systems, communication protocols, and data transmission formats.
- Standardization: ASCII has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and is widely used in various computing applications, including text processing, data transmission, and programming languages.
- Character Encoding: ASCII encoding maps each character to its corresponding numeric value, allowing computers to store, process, and transmit textual data in a standardized format. For example, the ASCII code for the uppercase letter ‘A’ is 65 (decimal) or 0x41 (hexadecimal).
- Extended ASCII: Extended ASCII variants (such as ISO 8859) extend the original ASCII character set by using all 8 bits of a byte, allowing for additional characters and symbols. However, extended ASCII variants are not fully compatible with each other and may lead to encoding issues.
Despite its limitations (such as the inability to represent characters from non-English languages), ASCII remains an essential and foundational character encoding standard in computing, forming the basis for more advanced encoding schemes like UTF-8 and UTF-16 that support a broader range of characters and languages.