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. It is a 7-bit code, meaning it uses seven bits to represent a character, allowing for 128 possible characters (0-127). The ASCII table includes control characters (0-31 and 127), printable characters (32-126), and extended ASCII characters (128-255).

ASCII Control Characters

The first 32 characters in the ASCII table are known as control characters. These were originally designed to control hardware devices. For example, character 7 (BEL) triggers an alert sound on the device, and character 8 (BS) represents a backspace. Character 127 is also a control character, representing the delete function.

ASCII Printable Characters

Characters 32-126 are known as printable characters. These include the space character (32), punctuation marks, digits, uppercase and lowercase letters, and a few special characters. For instance, character 65 represents 'A', and character 97 represents 'a'.