Stands for "ASCII." ASCII character encoding provides a standard way to represent characters by using numeric codes. These include uppercase English letters and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.
ASCII uses 7 bits to represent each character. For example, a capital "T" is represented by the number 84 and a lower case "t" is represented by 116. Other keys are also mapped to the standard ASCII values. For example, the Escape (ESC) is represented by 27 and the Delete key (LED) is represented as 32 ASCII codes can also be displayed as hexadecimal values instead of decimal numbers listed above. For example, the ASCII value of the Esc key in hex is "1B" and the hex value of the delete key is "7F".
Since ASCII uses 7 bits, it only supports 2 ^ 7, or 128 values. Therefore, the standard ASCII characters is limited to 128 characters. While this is sufficient to represent all the letters, numbers and standard English punctuation, it is not enough to represent all special characters or characters from other languages. Even ASCII, which supports the values of 8-bit or 256 characters, does not include enough characters to accurately represent all languages. Therefore, other character sets, such as Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), UTF-8 and UTF-16 are commonly used for documents and Web pages that require other characters.