ASCIIcharacter

ASCII, short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a 7-bit character encoding that represents text and control commands in computing and telecommunications equipment. It defines 128 code points, numbered 0 through 127. The first 32 and the 127th are control characters used for text formatting and device control, such as NUL (0), BEL (7), BS (8), HT (9), LF (10), CR (13), and DEL (127). The remaining 96 code points (32–126) are printable characters, including digits 0–9, uppercase letters A–Z, lowercase letters a–z, and common punctuation marks.

Historically, ASCII was developed in the 1960s by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a common standard for representing text in computer systems and communication protocols. It played a central role in the early days of computing and remains widely used in software and networks. Many software interfaces and network protocols rely on ASCII for text data, commands, and headers.

ASCII is limited to 128 characters, which is insufficient for many languages and scripts. To accommodate more symbols, extended ASCII schemes were created (such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 and Windows-1252) and, more comprehensively, Unicode, which includes ASCII as its first 128 code points. In UTF-8, ASCII characters map to single bytes identical to their ASCII codes, ensuring backward compatibility with ASCII-based systems.