ASCII
American character encoding standard / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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ASCII (/ˈæskiː/ (
listen) ASS-kee),[3]: 6 abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of technical limitations of computer systems at the time it was invented, ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limited its scope. All modern computer systems instead use Unicode, which has millions of code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as the ASCII set.
 ASCII chart from MIL-STD-188-100 (1972) | |
| MIME / IANA | us-ascii |
|---|---|
| Alias(es) | ISO-IR-006,[1] ANSI_X3.4-1968, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ISO_646.irv:1991, ISO646-US, us, IBM367, cp367[2] |
| Language(s) | English (made for; does not support all loanwords), Malay, Rotokas, Interlingua, Ido, and X-SAMPA |
| Classification | ISO/IEC 646 series |
| Extensions |
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| Preceded by | ITA 2, FIELDATA |
| Succeeded by | ISO/IEC 8859, ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) |
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding.[2]
ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones.