ASCII

ASCII

NAME DESCRIPTION HISTORY SEE ALSO

NAME

ascii - the ASCII character set encoded in octal, decimal, and hexadecimal

DESCRIPTION

ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a 7-bit code. Many 8-bit codes (such as ISO 8859-1, the Linux default character set) contain ASCII as their lower half. The international counterpart of ASCII is known as ISO 646.

The following table contains the 128 ASCII characters.

C program 'X' escapes are noted.

HISTORY

An ascii manual page appeared in Version 7 AT__

On older terminals, the underscore code is displayed as a left arrow, called backarrow, the caret is displayed as an up-arrow and the vertical bar has a hole in the middle.

Uppercase and lowercase characters differ by just one bit and the ASCII character 2 differs from the double quote by just one bit, too. That made it much easier to encode characters mechanically or with a non-microcontroller-based electronic keyboard and that pairing was found on old teletypes.

The ASCII standard was published by the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI) in 1968.

SEE ALSO

iso_8859_1(7), __iso_8859_15__(7)?, iso_8859_7(7)