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.