ASCII

3.ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is pronounced as Ass key .Each character in the English alphabet is represented as numbers in this code. 

Conversion of characters into numbers is necessary because after all computers can manipulate only numbers. Text files using the ASCII format are also known as ASCII files.

 In ASCII, each character is represented by a unique 7-bit or 8-bit binary code. There are 128 standard ASCII characters, including the letters of the alphabet (uppercase and lowercase), digits, punctuation marks, and various control characters (e.g., line feed, carriage return, tab). Some extended versions of ASCII use 8 bits to represent 256 characters, including special symbols, international characters, and graphics.

For example, the character 'A' is represented as 65 and 'a' is represented as 97. These numbers start from 0 and go on till 127. Hence, a total of 128 (27=128) characters can be represented using this code.

ASCII is still widely used today, especially in legacy systems, but it has largely been replaced by Unicode, which is a more modern and versatile character encoding standard that can represent the characters of many different languages and scripts.