The ASCII character set is a collection of what is considered the ‘standard’ set of characters for computers to use. It contains 96 characters, both lower- and upper-case, as well as 32 control characters. Each of them is numbered so that they can be described and used regardless of which individual system they are on as two different systems may show them differently. the ASCII characters are the same regardless of the font used.
Technipages Explains ASCII Character Set
The characters contained are 32 lowercase characters, 32 uppercase and 32 nonprinting control characters. In order to more easily describe them, the characters are numbered.
Originally, the ASCII system was established in the 1960s. It uses a somewhat unusual 7-bit coding scheme and cannot represent the characters used by non-latin-lettered languages. In other words, while it can be used for English and Italian, it can’t be used for Russian or Japanese.
Almost all modern computers default to more elaborate and extended characters sets that allow for accented characters like they are used by the French, as well as ones that contain technical and illustrative characters.
These character sets are generally proprietary and, unlike the ASCII set, not the same on different machines. IBM PCs have different character sets from Macintosh ones and so on.
Since this could be a problem on the internet, web browsers don’t use a computer’s native character set, but rather a standard one called ISO Latin-1 character set.
Common Uses of ASCII Character Set
- The ASCII character set is severely limited when it comes to languages it can be used with.
- Even variations of characters such as German Umlauts aren’t part of the ASCII character set.
- The individual numbering of each character in the ASCII set makes it easy to use across multiple types of PC.
Common Misuses of ASCII Character Set
- ASCII is a programming language.
