ASCII, Unicode, EBCDIC

Letters and symbols

• Letters and symbols
– To store letters and symbols, the computer assigns
every character on the keyboard a numerical value.
– Computers remember letters and other symbols by
storing the binary number for the symbol.
– For this system to work a standard numbering system
needs to be defined and consistently used for all
symbols that the computer needs to process.

2
3
4
5
 ASCII
• ASCII is originally a 7-bit code. It has been extended to 8-bit to
better utilize the 8-bit computer memory organization. (The
8th-bit was originally used for parity check in the early
computers.)
• Code numbers 32 to 126 are printable (displayable)
characters
• Code number 32 is the blank or space character.
• Code numbers 0 to 31 and 127 are special control characters,
which are non-printable (non-displayable),

6
7
8
ASCII table has been given in another ppt (which was
done in class)

9
Why do 0 through 9 have ASCII values?
• Numbers that are used in mathematical calculations
– If a computer needs to do math with a number it will store that number using
the appropriate binary representation of the number.
– This makes it easier for the computer to perform mathematical calculations
with the number.
– Example: 5 would be stored as
00000101

• Numbers that are NOT used in mathematical calculations

– If the computer does NOT need to do math with the number (e.g. a zip code)
then it will generally store the number using the ASCII values of the digits.
– In this case using the ASCII value is more efficient
– Example 5 would be stored using its ASCII value of 53 which is represented in
binary as
00110101

10
11
12
• A Unicode transformation format (UTF) is an
algorithmic mapping from every Unicode code
point to a unique byte sequence.
• UTF-8 is most common on the web.
• UTF-16 is used by Java and Windows.
• UTF-8 and UTF-32 are used by Linux and
various Unix systems.

13
 Other numbering systems (Unicode and
EBCDIC)
• ASCII
– ASCII was the standard numbering system for many years and is still used widely today.
– used by minicomputers and personal computers

• EBCDIC
– Is a different numbering system used by IBM Mainframe computers.
– Eight bits equals one character
– It is very similar to ASCII but uses different numbers to represent the symbols.
– EBCDIC stands for “Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code”

• Unicode
– ASCII and EBCDIC are limited to just the basic English letters and common symbols.
– Today computers use many different symbols including letters from languages that don’t use
English letters (e.g. Hebrew, Chinese, etc.) and international symbols (e.g. the English pound
sign)
– Unicode defines a unique number for every symbol in all known languages (e.g. Hebrew,
Chinese, etc.) and commonly used non-letter symbols (e.g. English pound sign, copyright
symbol, etc).
– Modern programs are moving towards using Unicode to store letters and symbols.
– It should be noted that Unicode numbers 1-128 correspond to the EXACT SAME symbols as
ASCII 1-128

14
ASCII. ASCII (pronounced AS-key) stands for the American Standard Code
for Information Interchange. Today, the ASCII character set is by far the
most commonly used in computers of all types. ASCII is an eight-bit code that specifics characters
for values
from 0 to 127.
≫ Extended ASCII. Extended ASCII is an eight-bit code that specifies the characters
for values from 128 to 255. The first 40 symbols represent pronunciation
and special punctuation. The remaining symbols are graphic symbols.

15
≫ Unicode. The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard provides up to four bytes—32
bits—to represent each letter; number, or symbol. With four bytes, enough
Unicode codes can be created to represent more than 4 billion different characters
or symbols. This total is enough for every unique character and symbol in the
world, including the vast Chinese, Korean, and Japanese character sets and those
found in known classical and historical texts. In addition to world letters, special
mathematical and scientific symbols are represented in Unicode. One major
advantage that Unicode has over other text code systems is its compatibility with
ASCII codes. The first 256 codes in
Unicode are identical to the 256 codes used by the ASCII and Extended ASCII systems.

16