ASCII

ASCII

ASCII means American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an industry standard, which assigns letters, numbers, and other characters within the 256 slots available in the 8 bit code.

The ASCII table is divided in 3 sections:

●    Non printable system codes between 0 and 31.

●   "Lower ASCII" between 32 and 127. This part of the table originates from older, American ADP systems, which work d on 7 bit character tables. Foreign letters, like Ø and Ü were not available then.

●   "Higher ASCII" between 128 and 255. This part is programmable, in that you can exchange characters, based on which language you want to write in. Foreign letters are placed in this part.

An example

Let us imagine a stream of bits sent from the keyboard to the computer. When you type, streams of 8 bits are sent to the computer.
Let us look at a series of bits: 001100010011001000110011
Bits are combined into bytes (each 8 bits). These 24 bits are interpreted as three bytes. Let us read them as bytes: 00110001, 00110010, and 00110011.
When we convert these byte binary numbers to decimal numbers, you will see that they read as 49, 50, and 51 in decimal numbers. To interpret these numbers, we have to look at the ASCII table. You will find that you have typed the numbers 1, 2, and 3.