There doesn’t exist an image of each letter somewhere on the hard drive of your computer. What Is ASCII Used For?Ĭomputers don’t store characters as characters themselves. You find the complete ASCII table further below. Therefore, the basic and extended ASCII tables combined total in 256 characters. There is also an extension to the basic ASCII table that adds another 128 characters. These codes originated with teletype machines, and the majority of them are now obsolete. The ASCII code also includes 33 control codes, which can’t be printed. These include digits like 0 to 9 and alphabetic letters from a to z, both lower and upper case, plus punctuation symbols. It’s possible to print 95 of the encoded characters. The basic ASCII table includes 128 characters specified into 7-bit integers. The ASCII decimal is made up of binary, the language used by computers.ĪSCII corresponds to the English alphabet. Now that you’ve got the terminology down, on to your question.ĪSCII is a standard coding system that assigns numbers, letters, and symbols to the 256 slots in an 8-bit code-you’ll learn further below what 8-bit exactly is. What Is ASCII?įirst, a reminder of what ASCII stands for: American Standard Code for Information Interchange.īy the way, ASCII is pronounced “as-key” (just in case you ever have to say it aloud). This guide explains what ASCII code is, how it’s used, why it’s important, the history of ASCII, and its purposes today. Most of the modern character-encoding schemes used today are rooted in ASCII such as UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. The standard ASCII code serves telecommunications devices, computers, and other technology. That’s the term preferred by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA. You may also see it referred to as US-ASCII. Since the full name is quite a mouthful, the term is usually abbreviated simply to ASCII. That’s the short ASCII definition-but there’s way more to say on the topic, as this guide will show you. What Is an ASCII Table and What Does It Contain?Īmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange is a method of character encoding used in electronic communication.So if you want to learn all about ASCII, then you are in the right place.

Ascii table