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Characters

Characters

Lesson Objectives
  • Different characters set such as:
  • ASCII
  • Extended ASCII
  • Unicode
  • Applications of each of these character sets.

What is a character?
  • A character or symbol is present on the keyboard.
  • It has a specific character code that consists of numbers.
  • A code is generated for each character or symbol while typing on a keyboard.
  • This code is then converted to its character or symbol for displaying and printing purposes. 

Character sets
  • A complete set of all the characters is called a character set.
  • Different languages are represented using different character sets.
  • These character sets are unique to meet global standards. 

ASCII

  • The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set is a 7-bit set of codes that can represent 128 different characters.
  • This consists of upper-case letters, lower-case letters, digits, punctuation marks, special characters, and control characters.
  • ASCII code is used for English only. 
  • Below are ASCII examples:


Complete list of ASCII characters


Extended ASCII
 
  • Extended ASCII code consists of an 8-bit character set, and hence 256 different characters can be encoded.
  • Characters used in European languages can also be represented in this coding.
 
Unicode


  • Unicode is the industrial standard for encoding characters in most of the world’s writing systems.
  • Initially, this was a 16-bit system that permitted over 65 000 characters.
  • The number of bits has now been extended up to 32, permitting coding of several billions of characters.
  • This system uses 8 to 32 bits per character.
  • Because of a higher number of bits per character in Unicode, the files occupy a higher memory space too.  
  • Facebook and Google also use the Unicode system as users communicate in different languages.
  • The ASCII codes for the characters and symbols remained unchanged in Unicode.
  • The codes for characters from other languages were added to the list.
  • Unicode allocates character codes for languages all over the world.
  • Several code pages are used to represent Unicode.
  • Microsoft word provides an option for users to select letters from other languages such as Thai, Greek, and Latin.
  • A user can also type a specific character in a document.
  • For example: to enter the character “฿”, its Unicode (OE3F) is typed, and then ALT+X keys are typed.

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