How many ascii characters

They therefore there need a way for a computer to convert letters and other "characters" to and from numbers so that they can be stored inside the computer and manipulated by the computer. These were initially developed for tasks such as sending documents to printers, and many of the commands make sense in this context.

Every letter, number, punctuation mark, etc. Note there is a difference between the 8-bit binary representation of the number zero and the corresponding ASCII '0' printing character. As an example of the use of ASCII, consider the problem of printing on a screen or printer the result of a numerical calculation. W3Schools is optimized for learning and training.

Examples might be simplified to improve reading and learning. Tutorials, references, and examples are constantly reviewed to avoid errors, but we cannot warrant full correctness of all content. While using W3Schools, you agree to have read and accepted our terms of use , cookie and privacy policy. Copyright by Refsnes Data. A common code used for accented characters is Quoted-Printable. Any extended characters higher than are encoded using a string of three symbols.

To allow a code to function on two different kinds of machines with different operating systems and different built-in character sets, we all have to agree on standard character sets into which we will translate. But as long as a computer knows which character set is being used, it can be programmed to translate and display those characters, no matter what the computer's native character set may be. A MIME compliant email program will use the email headers to keep track of which character set and which encoding scheme are applied to each email message.

A web browser will do the same. This allows the program to convert and know how to display the characters on any given machine so the entire encoding system is transparent the user doesn't notice to the user. And these same MIME headers are also used in web pages so that a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox knows how to display each page, no matter where it was created and no matter where it is being viewed.

As long as the computer knows which character set is represented, it knows which character to display. You also have to get the characters into the computer in the first place.