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It can be used to represent sets of computer processor instructions, text, and other information that utilizes a two-symbol system. As the name implies, this computer code is a two-symbol system, usually composed of 0 and 1. Other schemes such as HTML cover formatting.Those seemingly endless series of zeros and ones that make your head spin or those same sets of green numbers you see in a Matrix movie are called binary codes.
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If you prepare a text in ASCII format, you will get plain text with no format such as bold, and any computer can understand the format. At one time ASCII was used on the World Wide Web as the most commonly used character encoding. Many of today’s character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, plus they include additional characters. Work on ASCII began in the 1960’s through a committee of the American Standards Association. ASCII covers over 100 characters with some of these characters being control characters that control how text appears. For example, 097 is the ASCII numerical representation of the character a. ASCII was originally developed from telegraphic codes.Ĭomputers can only understand numbers, and ASCII codes are numerical representations of characters that a computer can understand. Based on the English alphabet, ASCII is a character-encoding scheme.
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With applications in computers and other devices that use text, ASCII codes represent text. ASCII is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Input text to convert to these ASCII numbers. Text in a computer is stored as numbers called ASCII numbers with each letter having its own number.
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