ASCII Encoding

ASCII is a 7 bit encoding standard used to represent latin characters, digits and a few special characters as bytes. It is one of the earliest character encoding standards. The ASCII standard was initially published in 1963 and comprised of 128 characters represented by bytes ranging from 0 to 127.

ASCII Control Characters

The first 32 ASCII codes are reserved for devices such as printers. These characters cannot be displayed on screen. Although, there are whitespace characters such as space, tab and newline in this list which have meaning on display devices too. The ASCII character DEL which has a code of 127 also makes this list. Given below is a table showing the ASCII control characters and their corresponding byte values.

Printable ASCII Characters

These characters are what give ASCII their meaning. It comprises of roman letters in upper and lower case, digits and special characters that you find in most keyboards.

Extended ASCII Characters

With the increase in prevalence of 8, 16 and 32 bit computers, applications started storing characters using 8 bits as opposed to 7. This led to the ASCII character set being extended to support additional characters. While, there are many such standards, the ANSI standard is the most widely used. Given below are the extended ASCII characters which are represented by bytes from 128 to 255.