Characters

What is a character set

• A character set is a defined list of characters that can be understood by a computer 

• Each character is given a unique binary code

The two most common character sets are

• Two common character sets are:

• American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

• Universal Character Encoding (UNICODE)

What is ASCII

• ASCII is a character set and was an accepted standard for information interchange

• ASCII uses 8 bits, providing 27 unique codes (128) or a maximum of 128 characters it can represent

• ASCII only represents basic characters needed for English, limiting its use for other languages

What is Extended ASCII

• Extended ASCII uses 8 bits, providing 256 unique codes (28 = 256) or a maximum of 256 characters it can represent

• Extended ASCII provides essential characters such as mathematical operators and more recent symbols such as ©

What are limitations of ASCII and extended ASCII

• ASCII has a limited number of characters which means it can only represent the English alphabet, numbers and some special characters

• 
  ASCII cannot represent characters from languages other than English

• ASCII does not include modern symbols or emojis common in today's digital communication

What is UNICODE

• UNICODE is a character set and was created as a solution to the limitations of ASCII

• UNICODE uses a minimum of 16 bits, providing 216  unique codes (65,536) or a minimum of 65,536 characters it can represent

• UNICODE can represent characters from all the major languages around the world

Benefits and drawbacks of UNICODE

can represent more characters than ASCII. 

It can support all common characters across the world.

It can represent special characters such as emoji's.

Drawbacks

It uses a lot more storage space than ASCII.