ASCIIkarakterekkel

ASCII characters refer to a character encoding standard that uses numeric codes to represent letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and control characters. The name ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It was originally developed in the 1960s and became widely adopted in computing.

The standard ASCII character set includes 128 characters, numbered from 0 to 127. Each character is assigned a unique 7-bit binary code. This allows for a wide range of symbols to be represented, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, digits 0-9, common punctuation marks like !, ?, ., and comma, as well as various special symbols.

Beyond the printable characters, ASCII also defines control characters. These are non-visual characters that are used to control devices or manage data transmission. Examples include the newline character (often represented as LF, line feed) and the carriage return character (CR).

ASCII was foundational for early computing and networking. Its simplicity and widespread adoption made it a common language for computers to communicate with each other and to display text. While modern computing often uses more extensive character sets like Unicode to support a much broader range of languages and symbols, ASCII remains relevant as a subset and a fundamental building block for many digital systems and file formats. Many systems still interpret or store data using ASCII encoding, especially in plain text files.