ASCII - what is it? Easily explained
Perhaps you have come across the term ASCII on the Internet and do not know what that is. ASCII is a character encoding. You can read exactly how this looks in the first section of this article. You can also find out how to encode a word using ASCII in the second section.
ASCII - what is it?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
- ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding.
- The ASCII character encoding defines 128 characters.
- Among them are 95 printable and 33 non-printable characters such as a line feed.
- A bit pattern of 7 bits is assigned to each individual character.
- Each bit can have two values, namely 0 or 1. This results in a bit pattern number of 2 states up to 7 bits, for a total of 128 states.
- However, a byte always consists of 8 bits. The eighth bit not used for ASCII can, for example, be used for error corrections. It's called the parity bit.
- Today, the 7-bit code is almost always expanded to an 8-bit code.
ASCII coding - how it works
If you want to encode the word "CHIP" in ASCII, do the following:
- You need an ASCII table for this.
- The word CHIP can be encoded in hexadecimal or binary.
- For binary coding, string the binary values one after the other according to the letter. The result is the following binary ASCII code: 01000011010010000100100101010000
- You need an extended table for hexadecimal coding. Line up the hexadecimal values in the table one by one according to the letter. The following code then results for the word CHIP: 67727380
With your new knowledge of ASCII code, you can, for example, change the character encoding in Word.