ASCII

ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices that use text.

ASCII uses a 7-bit binary number to represent each character. This allows for 128 possible characters (2^7 = 128). These characters include:

• Uppercase and lowercase English letters (A-Z, a-z).
• Digits (0-9).
• Basic punctuation symbols.
• Control characters (like carriage return, line feed, tab).

Apart from printable characters like letters and numbers, ASCII also includes control characters. These are non-printable characters that control the flow of data in transmission and display, such as the start and end of a transmission or a new line. The ASCII table maps each character to a numerical value. For example, the capital letter "A" is represented by the number 65.

While ASCII has largely been superseded by [[Unicode]] (which can represent far more characters and supports multiple languages and scripts), it laid the foundation for modern character encoding. Many modern systems and protocols still use ASCII or an extended form of it.