What is
ASCII? ASCII stands
for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the
numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or
an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago
and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their
original purpose. Below is the ASCII character table and this
includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters.
ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes and so the
descriptions are somewhat obscure. If someone says they want
your CV however in ASCII format, all this means is they want
'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold or
underscoring - the raw format that any computer can
understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file
into their own applications without issues. Notepad.exe
creates ASCII text, or in MS Word you can save a file as 'text
only'
Simple ASCII
Table
Extended ASCII
Codes
As people gradually
required computers to understand additional characters and
non-printing characters the ASCII set became restrictive. As
with most technology, it took a while to get a single standard
for these extra characters and hence there are few varying
'extended' sets. The most popular is presented below.
IBM Scan
Codes
The following table is
nothing to do with ASCII, but has been requested by a number
of you out there. When a key on your keyboard is pressed, a
code is sent which can be recognised by software. Programmers
will find the most use for this table to map keys to actions
for the function keys etc.
Copyright Paul Langford 2001
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