ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and Unicode are two widely used character encoding standards in computing. ASCII, developed in the 1960s, is a 7-bit character set that includes 128 characters, primarily consisting of English alphabets, numbers, and basic symbols¹. Each character in ASCII is represented by a unique 7 or 8-bit binary number. For example, the ASCII code for uppercase 'A' is 65, and for 'B' is 66¹.

Unicode, introduced in the 1990s, is a more comprehensive character encoding standard that aims to support characters from all writing systems across the world². It uses a variable-length encoding scheme, allowing it to represent over 1 million characters. Unicode can be defined with different character encodings like UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, with UTF-8 being the most popular¹.

Key Differences

Character Set