| Representation of Characters | |||
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character can be a letter, a digit, a
space, a punctuation mark or some other non-printable control character. When a single character is stored in memory, it is stored as a binary number. It is important that all computers use the same binary number for each character - otherwise data could not be exchanged between computers. A document created on one computer would not be readable on another. Standardised character sets must therefore be used. ASCII (American Standardised Code for Information Interchange) is an example of a widely used 7-bit character set.
Many character sets are 8-bit extensions to the ASCII set, providing more characters. Most letters and digits are the same codes, but a '£' character code in one set may be a '$' character code in another. Other character sets include... EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) ANSI (American National Standards Institute) ISO 8859 - an International standard that has codes for characters used in other languages. Eg. ß (German), ñ (Spanish), å (Swedish)
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The 95 printable ASCII characters |
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