ASCIImerkkeistä

ASCIImerkki (ASCII character) refers to a character encoded using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard. This standard assigns a unique number to each letter, digit, punctuation mark, and control character. Originally developed in the early 1960s, ASCII was one of the first widely adopted character encoding standards. It forms the basis of many modern character sets, though its limited scope of 128 characters (0-127) means it cannot represent characters from many languages or specialized symbols.

The ASCII set includes uppercase and lowercase English letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), common punctuation symbols (!, ?, ., ,, etc.), and a set of control characters like newline and tab. These control characters were historically used to manage text formatting and device operation. For example, ASCII code 65 represents the uppercase letter 'A', and ASCII code 49 represents the digit '1'.

While modern computing often utilizes extended character sets like Unicode, which can represent millions of characters, ASCII remains foundational. Many systems still interpret basic text files using ASCII encoding, and it is often the default or fallback when encountering unknown character data. Understanding ASCII characters is fundamental to comprehending how text is represented and processed in digital systems.