ASCII and other character sets
ASCII bit count
7 bit, 128 characters maximum.
Extended ASCII bit count
8 bit (1 byte), 256 characters maximum.
character set
A finite group of different characters that is complete for a given purpose, for example, the 128 ASCII characters.
Differences among the 3 character sets
ASCII only supports English, no other languages. Extended ASCII supports other European languages, since only a few new characters had to be added to support it. Unicode supports almost all languages, since it has a large amount of spaces free for new characters.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Unicode
An extension to ASCII, so there are many more character possibilities available. Allows for multiple non-European languages to be supported.
Unicode bit count
Up to 16 bit (2 bytes) or 32 bit (4 bytes), 2^16 (65536) or 2^32 (4294967296) characters available.
The character +
You can find this in the ASCII character set
The Arabic character ࢣ
You can find this in the Unicode character set
The character Á
You can find this in the extended ASCII character set
Character
a symbol, number, or letter. Characters can be assigned a value, such as a binary code.
Extended ASCII
includes all 128 ASCII characters with additional characters in other European languages
Unicode usage
the industrial standard for encoding characters in most of the world's writing system. Facebook and Google also use this system as users communicate in different languages.
