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What is ASCII encoding and its character set range

2026年2月21日 16:18

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which uses 7-bit binary numbers to represent 128 characters, including control characters (0-31) and printable characters (32-126).

Standard ASCII Character Set:

  • 0-31: Control characters (such as Line Feed LF, Carriage Return CR, Tab TAB, etc.)
  • 32-126: Printable characters (space, numbers, letters, punctuation marks, etc.)
  • 127: Delete character (DEL)

Extended ASCII:

  • Uses 8-bit binary numbers, can represent 256 characters
  • 128-255: Extended character set, including special symbols, graphic characters, etc.

Characteristics of ASCII:

  1. Single-byte encoding, each character occupies 1 byte
  2. Only supports English letters, numbers, and basic symbols
  3. Does not support Chinese, Japanese, and other non-Latin characters
  4. Is a subset of Unicode encoding (first 128 characters)

Application Scenarios:

  • Text file storage
  • Network protocol transmission
  • Character processing in programming
  • Data exchange standards
标签:ASCII