ASCII

Moves to avoid the problem of incompatible encodings resulted in the defining of ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which assigns an agreed value to commonly used characters (it is pronounced 'ask-key'). For example, two systems that use the ASCII standard will both assume that the value 84 represents the letter 'T', so they can exchange simple text data without risk of corruption.

Although ASCII is the predominant basic standard character set, there are a few alternatives. This includes EBCDIC, which is used on IBM mainframe systems and assigns the value 129 to the letter 'A' (instead of the ASCII value 65). Others include character sets for some foreign languages, such as Japanese.

Scope

ASCII defines values ...

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