Meaning – ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most accepted and commonly used character encoding, where characters are represented using numeric codes. These characters include upper and lowercase English letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols.
The standard ASCII can be used to represent 128 unique characters, and it makes use of 7 bits to represent any particular character, as the first bit for any of the 128 aforementioned characters is zero. For example the character ‘T’ can be represented as 84, or 01010100 in binary. Similarly, ‘t’ is represented by the number 116 or 01110100 in binary.
Similarly, all other characters on the keyboard are mapped to standard ASCII values. It may be noted here that the 128 characters can also be represented in hexadecimal values instead of the decimal letters.For example, the hexadecimal value of the Delete key (127) is 7F.
Example of usage – “All the characters on the keyboard of my laptop, are mapped to unique corresponding ASCII values”.
