How is a character represented in ASCII?

In ASCII, a character is represented by a unique 7-bit binary number.

ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computers and other devices that use text. Each character in the ASCII standard is represented by a unique 7-bit binary number. For example, the uppercase letter 'A' is represented by the binary number 1000001, which is 65 in decimal.

The ASCII standard includes definitions for 128 characters, which are made up of 95 printable characters (including the digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and punctuation symbols) and 33 non-printable control characters. The control characters were originally designed to control hardware devices. For example, the carriage return (CR) character tells a printer to move its print head back to the start of the line.

The ASCII standard was originally developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. The work on ASCII began in the early 1960's and the first version was published in 1963. The first computers used ASCII for all text-based input and output.

ASCII is a subset of Unicode, which is a more comprehensive standard that includes characters from most of the world's writing systems. In Unicode, the first 128 characters are the same as in ASCII, which means that any ASCII text is also valid Unicode text.

In summary, ASCII is a way of encoding characters as numbers that can be used by computers. Each character is represented by a unique 7-bit binary number, allowing for 128 different characters. This includes both printable characters like letters and numbers, and control characters that can be used to control hardware devices.