The basic standard for digital communication. All computers can communicate using ASCII, but more feature-rich applications need higher level standards or proprietary protocols.
The most popular character set used. It employs a 7- bit code for each character and punctuation mark, and consists of the first 128 (0-127) characters of the ANSI character set.
A widely used 7-bit character code for data communications and data processing. An eighth bit is added for parity checking. As a standard, ASCII enables digital communications between computers and similar systems, regardless of manufacturer.
Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, the ASCII code for uppercase M is 77. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. The standard ASCII character set uses just 7 bits for each character. There are several larger character sets that use 8 bits, which gives them 128 additional characters. The extra characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics symbols, and mathematical symbols. Several companies and organizations have proposed extensions for these 128 characters. The DOS operating system uses a superset of ASCII called extended ASCII or high ASCII. A more universal standard is the ISO Latin 1 set of characters, which is used by many operating systems, as well as Web browsers.
A code used by computers to represent all the letters, numbers etc on a computer keyboard. A file that only contains text characters from the ASCII character set. An ASCII file contains letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols, but does not contain any hidden text-formatting commands. Also known as a text file, and aSCII text file.
World-wide standard for the code numbers assigned to each key on the keyboard. ASCII text does not include formatting and therefore can be exchanged and read by most computer systems.
Bland, unformatted text files are best saved in ASCII (pronounced "askee") format. But ASCII is more than a text file format--it's a standard developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to define how computers write and read characters. The ASCII set of 128 characters includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and control codes (such as a character that marks the end of a line). Each letter or other character is represented by a number: an uppercase , for example, is the number 65, and a lowercase is the number 122. Most operating systems use the ASCII standard, except for Windows NT, which uses the suitably larger and newer Unicode standard.