Glossary / ASCII

Term: ASCII

ASCII is a 7-bit character set consisting of 128 different letters, numbers or punctuation symbols (the 8th bit is used as parity bit).

In ASCII, every character has a corresponding number, or ASCII code.

For example, the character for the number 7 has the code 55, capital letter C has the code 67, and a blank space has the code 32.

The ASCII encoding system lets a computer store a document as a series of numbers and allows it share those documents with other computers that use the ASCII system.

Extended ASCII

An 8-bit character set consisting of 256 characters.