established or well-known or widely recognized as a model of authority or excellence; "a standard reference work"; "the classical argument between free trade and protectionism"
the value behind the money in a monetary system (同)monetary standard
an upright pole or beam (especially one used as a support); "distance was marked by standards every mile"; "lamps supported on standards provided illumination"
a basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated; "the schools comply with federal standards"; "they set the measure for all subsequent work" (同)criterion, measure, touchstone
conforming to the established language usage of educated native speakers; "standard English" (American); "received standard English is sometimes called the Kings English" (British) (同)received
regularly and widely used or sold; "a standard size"; "a stock item" (同)stock
commonly used or supplied; "standard procedure"; "standard car equipment"
conforming to or constituting a standard of measurement or value; or of the usual or regularized or accepted kind; "windows of standard width"; "standard sizes"; "the standard fixtures"; "standard brands"; "standard operating procedure"
attach a code to; "Code the pieces with numbers so that you can identify them later"
a set of rules or principles or laws (especially written ones) (同)codification
(computer science) the symbolic arrangement of data or instructions in a computer program or the set of such instructions (同)computer code
a coding system used for transmitting messages requiring brevity or secrecy
convert ordinary language into code; "We should encode the message for security reasons" (同)encipher, cipher, cypher, encrypt, inscribe, write in code
「ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (formerly ANSI X3.4-1986) American National Standard for Information Systems ― Coded Character Sets ― 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)」American National Standards Institute(1963年6月17日制定、1986年3月26日最終改正、2002年1月15日規格番号変更)
Not to be confused with MS Windows-1252 or other types of extended ASCII.
This article is about the character encoding. For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation).
ASCII
ASCII (1967 or later)
MIME / IANA
us-ascii
Alias(es)
ASCII
Language(s)
English
Classification
ISO 646 series
Extensions
Unicode
ISO 8859 (series)
KOI-8
OEM (series)
Windows-125x (series)
Others
Preceded by
ITA 2, FIELDATA
Succeeded by
ISO 8859, Unicode
Other related encoding(s)
PETSCII
v
t
e
ASCII (/ˈæskiː/(listen)ASS-kee),[1]:6 abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.
ASCII is the traditional name for the encoding system; the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the updated name US-ASCII, which clarifies that this system was developed in the US and based on the typographical symbols predominantly in use there.[2]
ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones.
ASCII chart from an earlier-than 1972 printer manual (b1 is the least significant bit.)
Contents
1Overview
2History
3Design considerations
3.1Bit width
3.2Internal organization
3.3Character order
4Character groups
4.1Control characters
4.2Printable characters
4.3Character set
5Use
6Variants and derivations
6.17-bit codes
6.28-bit codes
6.3Unicode
7See also
8Notes
9References
10Further reading
11External links
Overview
ASCII was developed from telegraph code. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963,[3][4] underwent a major revision during 1967,[5][6] and experienced its most recent update during 1986.[7] Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.
Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above.[8] Ninety-five of the encoded characters are printable: these include the digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and punctuation symbols. In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype machines; most of these are now obsolete,[9] although a few are still commonly used, such as the carriage return, line feed and tab codes.
For example, lowercase i would be represented in the ASCII encoding by binary 1101001 = hexadecimal 69 (i is the ninth letter) = decimal 105.
History
ASCII (1963). Control pictures of equivalent controls are shown where they exist, or a grey dot otherwise.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association (ASA), called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee's X3.2.4 working group (now INCITS). The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI)[1]:211 and ultimately the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
With the other special characters and control codes filled in, ASCII was published as ASA X3.4-1963,[4][10] leaving 28 code positions without any assigned meaning, reserved for future standardization, and one unassigned control code.[1]:66, 245 There was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet.[1]:435 The indecision did not last long: during May 1963 the CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet proposed to assign lowercase characters to sticks[a][11] 6 and 7,[12] and International Organization for Standardization TC 97 SC 2 voted during October to incorporate the change into its draft standard.[13] The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting.[14] Locating the lowercase letters in sticks[a][11] 6 and 7 caused the characters to differ in bit pattern from the upper case by a single bit, which simplified case-insensitive character matching and the construction of keyboards and printers.
The X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters (the brace and vertical bar characters),[15] renaming some control characters (SOM became start of header (SOH)) and moving or removing others (RU was removed).[1]:247–248 ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3.4-1967,[5][16] then USAS X3.4-1968, ANSI X3.4-1977, and finally, ANSI X3.4-1986.[7][17]
Revisions of the ASCII standard:
ASA X3.4-1963[1][4][16][17]
ASA X3.4-1965 (approved, but not published, nevertheless used by IBM 2260 & 2265 Display Stations and IBM 2848 Display Control)[1]:423, 425–428, 435–439[18][16][17]
USAS X3.4-1967[1][5][17]
USAS X3.4-1968[1][17]
ANSI X3.4-1977[17]
ANSI X3.4-1986[7][17]
ANSI X3.4-1986 (R1992)
ANSI X3.4-1986 (R1997)
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2002)[19]
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007)[20]
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2012)
In the X3.15 standard, the X3 committee also addressed how ASCII should be transmitted (least significant bit first),[1]:249–253[21] and how it should be recorded on perforated tape. They proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats.
Design considerations
Bit width
The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems. Like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols (i.e. graphemes and control characters). This allows digital devices to communicate with each other and to process, store, and communicate character-oriented information such as written language. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters, 10 numerical digits, and from 11 to 25 special graphic symbols. To include all these, and control characters compatible with the Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT) International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) standard of 1924,[22][23] FIELDATA (1956[citation needed]), and early EBCDIC (1963), more than 64 codes were required for ASCII.
ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874.[23]
The committee debated the possibility of a shift function (like in ITA2), which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the following character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is less reliable for data transmission, as an error in transmitting the shift code typically makes a long part of the transmission unreadable. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code.[1]:215, 236 § 4
The committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits (octets) would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal. However, it would require all data transmission to send eight bits when seven could suffice. The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission. Since perforated tape at the time could record eight bits in one position, it also allowed for a parity bit for error checking if desired.[1]:217, 236 § 5 Eight-bit machines (with octets as the native data type) that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0.[24] In some printers, the high bit was used to enable Italics printing.
Internal organization
The code itself was patterned so that most control codes were together and all graphic codes were together, for ease of identification. The first two so called ASCII sticks[a][11] (32 positions) were reserved for control characters.[1]:220, 236 § 8,9) The "space" character had to come before graphics to make sorting easier, so it became position 20hex;[1]:237 § 10 for the same reason, many special signs commonly used as separators were placed before digits. The committee decided it was important to support uppercase 64-character alphabets, and chose to pattern ASCII so it could be reduced easily to a usable 64-character set of graphic codes,[1]:228, 237 § 14 as was done in the DEC SIXBIT code (1963). Lowercase letters were therefore not interleaved with uppercase. To keep options available for lowercase letters and other graphics, the special and numeric codes were arranged before the letters, and the letter A was placed in position 41hex to match the draft of the corresponding British standard.[1]:238 § 18 The digits 0–9 are prefixed with 011, but the remaining 4 bits correspond to their respective values in binary, making conversion with binary-coded decimal straightforward.
Many of the non-alphanumeric characters were positioned to correspond to their shifted position on typewriters; an important subtlety is that these were based on mechanical typewriters, not electric typewriters.[25] Mechanical typewriters followed the standard set by the Remington No. 2 (1878), the first typewriter with a shift key, and the shifted values of 23456789- were "#$%_&'() – early typewriters omitted 0 and 1, using O (capital letter o) and l (lowercase letter L) instead, but 1! and 0) pairs became standard once 0 and 1 became common. Thus, in ASCII !"#$% were placed in the second stick,[a][11] positions 1–5, corresponding to the digits 1–5 in the adjacent stick.[a][11] The parentheses could not correspond to 9 and 0, however, because the place corresponding to 0 was taken by the space character. This was accommodated by removing _ (underscore) from 6 and shifting the remaining characters, which corresponded to many European typewriters that placed the parentheses with 8 and 9. This discrepancy from typewriters led to bit-paired keyboards, notably the Teletype Model 33, which used the left-shifted layout corresponding to ASCII, not to traditional mechanical typewriters. Electric typewriters, notably the IBM Selectric (1961), used a somewhat different layout that has become standard on computers – following the IBM PC (1981), especially Model M (1984) – and thus shift values for symbols on modern keyboards do not correspond as closely to the ASCII table as earlier keyboards did. The /? pair also dates to the No. 2, and the ,< .> pairs were used on some keyboards (others, including the No. 2, did not shift , (comma) or . (full stop) so they could be used in uppercase without unshifting). However, ASCII split the ;: pair (dating to No. 2), and rearranged mathematical symbols (varied conventions, commonly -* =+) to :* ;+ -=.
Some common characters were not included, notably ½¼¢, while ^`~ were included as diacritics for international use, and <> for mathematical use, together with the simple line characters \| (in addition to common /). The @ symbol was not used in continental Europe and the committee expected it would be replaced by an accented À in the French variation, so the @ was placed in position 40hex, right before the letter A.[1]:243
The control codes felt essential for data transmission were the start of message (SOM), end of address (EOA), end of message (EOM), end of transmission (EOT), "who are you?" (WRU), "are you?" (RU), a reserved device control (DC0), synchronous idle (SYNC), and acknowledge (ACK). These were positioned to maximize the Hamming distance between their bit patterns.[1]:243–245
Character order
ASCII-code order is also called ASCIIbetical order.[26] Collation of data is sometimes done in this order rather than "standard" alphabetical order (collating sequence). The main deviations in ASCII order are:
All uppercase come before lowercase letters; for example, "Z" precedes "a"
Digits and many punctuation marks come before letters
An intermediate order converts uppercase letters to lowercase before comparing ASCII values.
Character groups
Control characters
Main article: Control character
ASCII reserves the first 32 codes (numbers 0–31 decimal) for control characters: codes originally intended not to represent printable information, but rather to control devices (such as printers) that make use of ASCII, or to provide meta-information about data streams such as those stored on magnetic tape.
For example, character 10 represents the "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance its paper), and character 8 represents "backspace". RFC 2822 refers to control characters that do not include carriage return, line feed or white space as non-whitespace control characters.[27] Except for the control characters that prescribe elementary line-oriented formatting, ASCII does not define any mechanism for describing the structure or appearance of text within a document. Other schemes, such as markup languages, address page and document layout and formatting.
The original ASCII standard used only short descriptive phrases for each control character. The ambiguity this caused was sometimes intentional, for example where a character would be used slightly differently on a terminal link than on a data stream, and sometimes accidental, for example with the meaning of "delete".
Probably the most influential single device on the interpretation of these characters was the Teletype Model 33 ASR, which was a printing terminal with an available paper tape reader/punch option. Paper tape was a very popular medium for long-term program storage until the 1980s, less costly and in some ways less fragile than magnetic tape. In particular, the Teletype Model 33 machine assignments for codes 17 (Control-Q, DC1, also known as XON), 19 (Control-S, DC3, also known as XOFF), and 127 (Delete) became de facto standards. The Model 33 was also notable for taking the description of Control-G (code 7, BEL, meaning audibly alert the operator) literally, as the unit contained an actual bell which it rang when it received a BEL character. Because the keytop for the O key also showed a left-arrow symbol (from ASCII-1963, which had this character instead of underscore), a noncompliant use of code 15 (Control-O, Shift In) interpreted as "delete previous character" was also adopted by many early timesharing systems but eventually became neglected.
When a Teletype 33 ASR equipped with the automatic paper tape reader received a Control-S (XOFF, an abbreviation for transmit off), it caused the tape reader to stop; receiving Control-Q (XON, "transmit on") caused the tape reader to resume. This technique became adopted by several early computer operating systems as a "handshaking" signal warning a sender to stop transmission because of impending overflow; it persists to this day in many systems as a manual output control technique. On some systems Control-S retains its meaning but Control-Q is replaced by a second Control-S to resume output. The 33 ASR also could be configured to employ Control-R (DC2) and Control-T (DC4) to start and stop the tape punch; on some units equipped with this function, the corresponding control character lettering on the keycap above the letter was TAPE and TAPE respectively.[28]
The Teletype could not move the head backwards, so it did not put a key on the keyboard to send a BS (backspace). Instead there was a key marked "rubout" that sent code 127 (DEL). The purpose of this key was to erase mistakes in a hand-typed paper tape: the operator had to push a button on the tape punch to back it up, then type the rubout, which punched all holes and replaced the mistake with a character that was intended to be ignored.[29] Teletypes were commonly used for the less-expensive computers from Digital Equipment Corporation, so these systems had to use the available key and thus the DEL code to erase the previous character.[30][31] Because of this, DEC video terminals (by default) sent the DEL code for the key marked "Backspace" while the key marked "Delete" sent an escape sequence, while many other terminals sent BS for the Backspace key. The Unix terminal driver could only use one code to back up, this could be set to BS or DEL, but not both, resulting in a very long period of annoyance where you had to correct it depending on what terminal you were using (modern shells using readline understand both codes). The assumption that no key sent a BS caused Control+H to be used for other purposes, such as a "help" command in Emacs.[32]
Many more of the control codes have been given meanings quite different from their original ones. The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning. This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning. Over time this meaning has been co-opted and has eventually been changed. In modern use, an ESC sent to the terminal usually indicates the start of a command sequence usually in the form of a so-called "ANSI escape code" (or, more properly, a "Control Sequence Introducer") from ECMA-48 (1972) and its successors, beginning with ESC followed by a "[" (left-bracket) character. An ESC sent from the terminal is most often used as an out-of-band character used to terminate an operation, as in the TECO and vi text editors. In graphical user interface (GUI) and windowing systems, ESC generally causes an application to abort its current operation or to exit (terminate) altogether.
The inherent ambiguity of many control characters, combined with their historical usage, created problems when transferring "plain text" files between systems. The best example of this is the newline problem on various operating systems. Teletype machines required that a line of text be terminated with both "Carriage Return" (which moves the printhead to the beginning of the line) and "Line Feed" (which advances the paper one line without moving the printhead). The name "Carriage Return" comes from the fact that on a manual typewriter the carriage holding the paper moved while the position where the typebars struck the ribbon remained stationary. The entire carriage had to be pushed (returned) to the right in order to position the left margin of the paper for the next line.
DEC operating systems (OS/8, RT-11, RSX-11, RSTS, TOPS-10, etc.) used both characters to mark the end of a line so that the console device (originally Teletype machines) would work. By the time so-called "glass TTYs" (later called CRTs or terminals) came along, the convention was so well established that backward compatibility necessitated continuing the convention. When Gary Kildall created CP/M he was inspired by some command line interface conventions used in DEC's RT-11. Until the introduction of PC DOS in 1981, IBM had no hand in this because their 1970s operating systems used EBCDIC instead of ASCII and they were oriented toward punch-card input and line printer output on which the concept of carriage return was meaningless. IBM's PC DOS (also marketed as MS-DOS by Microsoft) inherited the convention by virtue of being loosely based on CP/M,[33] and Windows inherited it from MS-DOS.
Unfortunately, requiring two characters to mark the end of a line introduces unnecessary complexity and questions as to how to interpret each character when encountered alone. To simplify matters plain text data streams, including files, on Multics[34] used line feed (LF) alone as a line terminator. Unix and Unix-like systems, and Amiga systems, adopted this convention from Multics. The original Macintosh OS, Apple DOS, and ProDOS, on the other hand, used carriage return (CR) alone as a line terminator; however, since Apple replaced these operating systems with the Unix-based macOS operating system, they now use line feed (LF) as well. The Radio Shack TRS-80 also used a lone CR to terminate lines.
Computers attached to the ARPANET included machines running operating systems such as TOPS-10 and TENEX using CR-LF line endings, machines running operating systems such as Multics using LF line endings, and machines running operating systems such as OS/360 that represented lines as a character count followed by the characters of the line and that used EBCDIC rather than ASCII. The Telnet protocol defined an ASCII "Network Virtual Terminal" (NVT), so that connections between hosts with different line-ending conventions and character sets could be supported by transmitting a standard text format over the network. Telnet used ASCII along with CR-LF line endings, and software using other conventions would translate between the local conventions and the NVT.[35] The File Transfer Protocol adopted the Telnet protocol, including use of the Network Virtual Terminal, for use when transmitting commands and transferring data in the default ASCII mode.[36][37] This adds complexity to implementations of those protocols, and to other network protocols, such as those used for E-mail and the World Wide Web, on systems not using the NVT's CR-LF line-ending convention.[38][39]
The PDP-6 monitor,[30] and its PDP-10 successor TOPS-10,[31] used Control-Z (SUB) as an end-of-file indication for input from a terminal. Some operating systems such as CP/M tracked file length only in units of disk blocks and used Control-Z to mark the end of the actual text in the file.[40] For these reasons, EOF, or end-of-file, was used colloquially and conventionally as a three-letter acronym for Control-Z instead of SUBstitute. The end-of-text code (ETX), also known as Control-C, was inappropriate for a variety of reasons, while using Z as the control code to end a file is analogous to it ending the alphabet and serves as a very convenient mnemonic aid. A historically common and still prevalent convention uses the ETX code convention to interrupt and halt a program via an input data stream, usually from a keyboard.
In C library and Unix conventions, the null character is used to terminate text strings; such null-terminated strings can be known in abbreviation as ASCIZ or ASCIIZ, where here Z stands for "zero".
Binary
Oct
Dec
Hex
Abbreviation
[b]
[c]
[d]
Name (1967)
1963
1965
1967
000 0000
000
0
00
NULL
NUL
␀
^@
Null
000 0001
001
1
01
SOM
SOH
␁
^A
Start of Heading
000 0010
002
2
02
EOA
STX
␂
^B
Start of Text
000 0011
003
3
03
EOM
ETX
␃
^C
End of Text
000 0100
004
4
04
EOT
␄
^D
End of Transmission
000 0101
005
5
05
WRU
ENQ
␅
^E
Enquiry
000 0110
006
6
06
RU
ACK
␆
^F
Acknowledgement
000 0111
007
7
07
BELL
BEL
␇
^G
\a
Bell
000 1000
010
8
08
FE0
BS
␈
^H
\b
Backspace[e][f]
000 1001
011
9
09
HT/SK
HT
␉
^I
\t
Horizontal Tab[g]
000 1010
012
10
0A
LF
␊
^J
\n
Line Feed
000 1011
013
11
0B
VTAB
VT
␋
^K
\v
Vertical Tab
000 1100
014
12
0C
FF
␌
^L
\f
Form Feed
000 1101
015
13
0D
CR
␍
^M
\r
Carriage Return[h]
000 1110
016
14
0E
SO
␎
^N
Shift Out
000 1111
017
15
0F
SI
␏
^O
Shift In
001 0000
020
16
10
DC0
DLE
␐
^P
Data Link Escape
001 0001
021
17
11
DC1
␑
^Q
Device Control 1 (often XON)
001 0010
022
18
12
DC2
␒
^R
Device Control 2
001 0011
023
19
13
DC3
␓
^S
Device Control 3 (often XOFF)
001 0100
024
20
14
DC4
␔
^T
Device Control 4
001 0101
025
21
15
ERR
NAK
␕
^U
Negative Acknowledgement
001 0110
026
22
16
SYNC
SYN
␖
^V
Synchronous Idle
001 0111
027
23
17
LEM
ETB
␗
^W
End of Transmission Block
001 1000
030
24
18
S0
CAN
␘
^X
Cancel
001 1001
031
25
19
S1
EM
␙
^Y
End of Medium
001 1010
032
26
1A
S2
SS
SUB
␚
^Z
Substitute
001 1011
033
27
1B
S3
ESC
␛
^[
\e[i]
Escape[j]
001 1100
034
28
1C
S4
FS
␜
^\
File Separator
001 1101
035
29
1D
S5
GS
␝
^]
Group Separator
001 1110
036
30
1E
S6
RS
␞
^^[k]
Record Separator
001 1111
037
31
1F
S7
US
␟
^_
Unit Separator
111 1111
177
127
7F
DEL
␡
^?
Delete[l][f]
Other representations might be used by specialist equipment, for example ISO 2047 graphics or hexadecimal numbers.
Printable characters
Codes 20hex to 7Ehex, known as the printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few miscellaneous symbols. There are 95 printable characters in total.[m]
Code 20hex, the "space" character, denotes the space between words, as produced by the space bar of a keyboard. Since the space character is considered an invisible graphic (rather than a control character)[1]:223[41] it is listed in the table below instead of in the previous section.
Code 7Fhex corresponds to the non-printable "delete" (DEL) control character and is therefore omitted from this chart; it is covered in the previous section's chart. Earlier versions of ASCII used the up arrow instead of the caret (5Ehex) and the left arrow instead of the underscore (5Fhex).[4][42]
Binary
Oct
Dec
Hex
Glyph
1963
1965
1967
010 0000
040
32
20
space
010 0001
041
33
21
!
010 0010
042
34
22
"
010 0011
043
35
23
#
010 0100
044
36
24
$
010 0101
045
37
25
%
010 0110
046
38
26
&
010 0111
047
39
27
'
010 1000
050
40
28
(
010 1001
051
41
29
)
010 1010
052
42
2A
*
010 1011
053
43
2B
+
010 1100
054
44
2C
,
010 1101
055
45
2D
-
010 1110
056
46
2E
.
010 1111
057
47
2F
/
011 0000
060
48
30
0
011 0001
061
49
31
1
011 0010
062
50
32
2
011 0011
063
51
33
3
011 0100
064
52
34
4
011 0101
065
53
35
5
011 0110
066
54
36
6
011 0111
067
55
37
7
011 1000
070
56
38
8
011 1001
071
57
39
9
011 1010
072
58
3A
:
011 1011
073
59
3B
;
011 1100
074
60
3C
<
011 1101
075
61
3D
=
011 1110
076
62
3E
>
011 1111
077
63
3F
?
100 0000
100
64
40
@
`
@
100 0001
101
65
41
A
100 0010
102
66
42
B
100 0011
103
67
43
C
100 0100
104
68
44
D
100 0101
105
69
45
E
100 0110
106
70
46
F
100 0111
107
71
47
G
100 1000
110
72
48
H
100 1001
111
73
49
I
100 1010
112
74
4A
J
100 1011
113
75
4B
K
100 1100
114
76
4C
L
100 1101
115
77
4D
M
100 1110
116
78
4E
N
100 1111
117
79
4F
O
101 0000
120
80
50
P
101 0001
121
81
51
Q
101 0010
122
82
52
R
101 0011
123
83
53
S
101 0100
124
84
54
T
101 0101
125
85
55
U
101 0110
126
86
56
V
101 0111
127
87
57
W
101 1000
130
88
58
X
101 1001
131
89
59
Y
101 1010
132
90
5A
Z
101 1011
133
91
5B
[
101 1100
134
92
5C
\
~
\
101 1101
135
93
5D
]
101 1110
136
94
5E
↑
^
101 1111
137
95
5F
←
_
110 0000
140
96
60
@
`
110 0001
141
97
61
a
110 0010
142
98
62
b
110 0011
143
99
63
c
110 0100
144
100
64
d
110 0101
145
101
65
e
110 0110
146
102
66
f
110 0111
147
103
67
g
110 1000
150
104
68
h
110 1001
151
105
69
i
110 1010
152
106
6A
j
110 1011
153
107
6B
k
110 1100
154
108
6C
l
110 1101
155
109
6D
m
110 1110
156
110
6E
n
110 1111
157
111
6F
o
111 0000
160
112
70
p
111 0001
161
113
71
q
111 0010
162
114
72
r
111 0011
163
115
73
s
111 0100
164
116
74
t
111 0101
165
117
75
u
111 0110
166
118
76
v
111 0111
167
119
77
w
111 1000
170
120
78
x
111 1001
171
121
79
y
111 1010
172
122
7A
z
111 1011
173
123
7B
{
111 1100
174
124
7C
ACK
¬
|
111 1101
175
125
7D
}
111 1110
176
126
7E
ESC
|
~
Character set
ASCII (1977/1986)
_0
_1
_2
_3
_4
_5
_6
_7
_8
_9
_A
_B
_C
_D
_E
_F
0_ 0
NUL 0000
SOH 0001
STX 0002
ETX 0003
EOT 0004
ENQ 0005
ACK 0006
BEL 0007
BS 0008
HT 0009
LF 000A
VT 000B
FF 000C
CR 000D
SO 000E
SI 000F
1_ 16
DLE 0010
DC1 0011
DC2 0012
DC3 0013
DC4 0014
NAK 0015
SYN 0016
ETB 0017
CAN 0018
EM 0019
SUB 001A
ESC 001B
FS 001C
GS 001D
RS 001E
US 001F
2_ 32
SP 0020
! 0021
" 0022
# 0023
$ 0024
% 0025
& 0026
' 0027
( 0028
) 0029
* 002A
+ 002B
, 002C
- 002D
. 002E
/ 002F
3_ 48
0 0030
1 0031
2 0032
3 0033
4 0034
5 0035
6 0036
7 0037
8 0038
9 0039
: 003A
; 003B
< 003C
= 003D
> 003E
? 003F
4_ 64
@ 0040
A 0041
B 0042
C 0043
D 0044
E 0045
F 0046
G 0047
H 0048
I 0049
J 004A
K 004B
L 004C
M 004D
N 004E
O 004F
5_ 80
P 0050
Q 0051
R 0052
S 0053
T 0054
U 0055
V 0056
W 0057
X 0058
Y 0059
Z 005A
[ 005B
\ 005C
] 005D
^ 005E
_ 005F
6_ 96
` 0060
a 0061
b 0062
c 0063
d 0064
e 0065
f 0066
g 0067
h 0068
i 0069
j 006A
k 006B
l 006C
m 006D
n 006E
o 006F
7_ 112
p 0070
q 0071
r 0072
s 0073
t 0074
u 0075
v 0076
w 0077
x 0078
y 0079
z 007A
{ 007B
| 007C
} 007D
~ 007E
DEL 007F
Letter Number Punctuation Symbol Other undefined Changed from 1963 version
Use
ASCII was first used commercially during 1963 as a seven-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX (TeletypeWriter eXchange) network. TWX originally used the earlier five-bit ITA2, which was also used by the competing Telex teleprinter system. Bob Bemer introduced features such as the escape sequence.[3] His British colleague Hugh McGregor Ross helped to popularize this work – according to Bemer, "so much so that the code that was to become ASCII was first called the Bemer–Ross Code in Europe".[43] Because of his extensive work on ASCII, Bemer has been called "the father of ASCII".[44]
On March 11, 1968, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all computers purchased by the United States Federal Government support ASCII, stating:[45][46][47]
I have also approved recommendations of the Secretary of Commerce [Luther H. Hodges] regarding standards for recording the Standard Code for Information Interchange on magnetic tapes and paper tapes when they are used in computer operations.
All computers and related equipment configurations brought into the Federal Government inventory on and after July 1, 1969, must have the capability to use the Standard Code for Information Interchange and the formats prescribed by the magnetic tape and paper tape standards when these media are used.
ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when UTF-8 encoding surpassed it; UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII.[48][49][50]
Variants and derivations
As computer technology spread throughout the world, different standards bodies and corporations developed many variations of ASCII to facilitate the expression of non-English languages that used Roman-based alphabets. One could class some of these variations as "ASCII extensions", although some misuse that term to represent all variants, including those that do not preserve ASCII's character-map in the 7-bit range. Furthermore, the ASCII extensions have also been mislabelled as ASCII.
7-bit codes
Main articles: ECMA-6, ISO/IEC 646, and ITU T.50
See also: UTF-7
From early in its development,[51] ASCII was intended to be just one of several national variants of an international character code standard.
Other international standards bodies have ratified character encodings such as ISO 646 (1967) that are identical or nearly identical to ASCII, with extensions for characters outside the English alphabet and symbols used outside the United States, such as the symbol for the United Kingdom's pound sterling (£). Almost every country needed an adapted version of ASCII, since ASCII suited the needs of only the US and a few other countries. For example, Canada had its own version that supported French characters.
Many other countries developed variants of ASCII to include non-English letters (e.g. é, ñ, ß, Ł), currency symbols (e.g. £, ¥), etc. See also YUSCII (Yugoslavia).
It would share most characters in common, but assign other locally useful characters to several code points reserved for "national use". However, the four years that elapsed between the publication of ASCII-1963 and ISO's first acceptance of an international recommendation during 1967[52] caused ASCII's choices for the national use characters to seem to be de facto standards for the world, causing confusion and incompatibility once other countries did begin to make their own assignments to these code points.
ISO/IEC 646, like ASCII, is a 7-bit character set. It does not make any additional codes available, so the same code points encoded different characters in different countries. Escape codes were defined to indicate which national variant applied to a piece of text, but they were rarely used, so it was often impossible to know what variant to work with and, therefore, which character a code represented, and in general, text-processing systems could cope with only one variant anyway.
Because the bracket and brace characters of ASCII were assigned to "national use" code points that were used for accented letters in other national variants of ISO/IEC 646, a German, French, or Swedish, etc. programmer using their national variant of ISO/IEC 646, rather than ASCII, had to write, and thus read, something such as
ä aÄiÜ = 'Ön'; ü
instead of
{ a[i] = '\n'; }
C trigraphs were created to solve this problem for ANSI C, although their late introduction and inconsistent implementation in compilers limited their use. Many programmers kept their computers on US-ASCII, so plain-text in Swedish, German etc. (for example, in e-mail or Usenet) contained "{, }" and similar variants in the middle of words, something those programmers got used to. For example, a Swedish programmer mailing another programmer asking if they should go for lunch, could get "N{ jag har sm|rg}sar" as the answer, which should be "Nä jag har smörgåsar" meaning "No I've got sandwiches".
8-bit codes
Main articles: Extended ASCII and ISO/IEC 8859
See also: UTF-8
Eventually, as 8-, 16- and 32-bit (and later 64-bit) computers began to replace 12-, 18- and 36-bit computers as the norm, it became common to use an 8-bit byte to store each character in memory, providing an opportunity for extended, 8-bit relatives of ASCII. In most cases these developed as true extensions of ASCII, leaving the original character-mapping intact, but adding additional character definitions after the first 128 (i.e., 7-bit) characters.
Encodings include ISCII (India), VISCII (Vietnam). Although these encodings are sometimes referred to as ASCII, true ASCII is defined strictly only by the ANSI standard.
Most early home computer systems developed their own 8-bit character sets containing line-drawing and game glyphs, and often filled in some or all of the control characters from 0 to 31 with more graphics. Kaypro CP/M computers used the "upper" 128 characters for the Greek alphabet.
The PETSCII code Commodore International used for their 8-bit systems is probably unique among post-1970 codes in being based on ASCII-1963, instead of the more common ASCII-1967, such as found on the ZX Spectrum computer. Atari 8-bit computers and Galaksija computers also used ASCII variants.
The IBM PC defined code page 437, which replaced the control characters with graphic symbols such as smiley faces, and mapped additional graphic characters to the upper 128 positions. Operating systems such as DOS supported these code pages, and manufacturers of IBM PCs supported them in hardware. Digital Equipment Corporation developed the Multinational Character Set (DEC-MCS) for use in the popular VT220 terminal as one of the first extensions designed more for international languages than for block graphics. The Macintosh defined Mac OS Roman and Postscript also defined a set, both of these contained both international letters and typographic punctuation marks instead of graphics, more like modern character sets.
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard (derived from the DEC-MCS) finally provided a standard that most systems copied (at least as accurately as they copied ASCII, but with many substitutions). A popular further extension designed by Microsoft, Windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1), added the typographic punctuation marks needed for traditional text printing. ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and the original 7-bit ASCII were the most common character encodings until 2008 when UTF-8 became more common.[49]
ISO/IEC 4873 introduced 32 additional control codes defined in the 80–9F hexadecimal range, as part of extending the 7-bit ASCII encoding to become an 8-bit system.[53]
Unicode
Main articles: Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646
See also: Basic Latin (Unicode block)
Unicode and the ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Character Set (UCS) have a much wider array of characters and their various encoding forms have begun to supplant ISO/IEC 8859 and ASCII rapidly in many environments. While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Unicode and the UCS support more characters by separating the concepts of unique identification (using natural numbers called code points) and encoding (to 8-, 16- or 32-bit binary formats, called UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32).
ASCII was incorporated into the Unicode (1991) character set as the first 128 symbols, so the 7-bit ASCII characters have the same numeric codes in both sets. This allows UTF-8 to be backward compatible with 7-bit ASCII, as a UTF-8 file containing only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file containing the same sequence of characters. Even more importantly, forward compatibility is ensured as software that recognizes only 7-bit ASCII characters as special and does not alter bytes with the highest bit set (as is often done to support 8-bit ASCII extensions such as ISO-8859-1) will preserve UTF-8 data unchanged.[54]
See also
Computing portal
3568 ASCII, an asteroid named after the character encoding
Ascii85
ASCII art
ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Basic Latin (Unicode block) (ASCII as a subset of Unicode)
Extended ASCII
HTML decimal character rendering
List of Unicode characters
Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang which includes a list of common slang names for ASCII characters
List of computer character sets
Alt codes
Notes
^ abcdeThe 128 characters of the 7-bit ASCII character set are divided into eight 16-character groups called sticks 0–7, associated with the three most-significant bits.[11] Depending on the horizontal or vertical representation of the character map, sticks correspond with either table rows or columns.
^The Unicode characters from the area U+2400 to U+2421 reserved for representing control characters when it is necessary to print or display them rather than have them perform their intended function. Some browsers may not display these properly.
^Caret notation is often used to represent control characters on a terminal. On most text terminals, holding down the Ctrl key while typing the second character will type the control character. Sometimes the shift key is not needed, for instance ^@ may be typable with just Ctrl and 2.
^Character escape sequences in C programming language and many other languages influenced by it, such as Java and Perl (though not all implementations necessarily support all escape sequences).
^The Backspace character can also be entered by pressing the ← Backspace key on some systems.
^ abThe ambiguity of Backspace is due to early terminals designed assuming the main use of the keyboard would be to manually punch paper tape while not connected to a computer. To delete the previous character, one had to back up the paper tape punch, which for mechanical and simplicity reasons was a button on the punch itself and not the keyboard, then type the rubout character. They therefore placed a key producing rubout at the location used on typewriters for backspace. When systems used these terminals and provided command-line editing, they had to use the "rubout" code to perform a backspace, and often did not interpret the backspace character (they might echo "^H" for backspace). Other terminals not designed for paper tape made the key at this location produce Backspace, and systems designed for these used that character to back up. Since the delete code often produced a backspace effect, this also forced terminal manufacturers to make any Delete key produce something other than the Delete character.
^The Tab character can also be entered by pressing the Tab ↹ key on most systems.
^The Carriage Return character can also be entered by pressing the ↵ Enter or Return key on most systems.
^The \e escape sequence is not part of ISO C and many other language specifications. However, it is understood by several compilers, including GCC.
^The Escape character can also be entered by pressing the Esc key on some systems.
^^^ means Ctrl+^ (pressing the "Ctrl" and caret keys).
^The Delete character can sometimes be entered by pressing the ← Backspace key on some systems.
^ abcdefghijklmnopqrsMackenzie, Charles E. (1980). Coded Character Sets, History and Development(PDF). The Systems Programming Series (1 ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. pp. 6, 66, 211, 215, 217, 220, 223, 228, 236–238, 243–245, 247–253, 423, 425–428, 435–439. ISBN 0-201-14460-3. LCCN 77-90165. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 26, 2016. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abBrandel, Mary (July 6, 1999). "1963: The Debut of ASCII". CNN. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^ abcd"American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASA X3.4-1963". American Standards Association (ASA). 1963-06-17. Archived from the original on September 28, 2018. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abc"USA Standard Code for Information Interchange, USAS X3.4-1967". United States of America Standards Institute (USASI). July 7, 1967.
^Jennings, Thomas Daniel (2016-04-20) [1999]. "An annotated history of some character codes or ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Infiltration". World Power Systems (WPS). Archived from the original on September 28, 2018. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abc"American National Standard for Information Systems — Coded Character Sets — 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII), ANSI X3.4-1986". American National Standards Institute (ANSI). March 26, 1986.
^Shirley, R. (August 2007), Internet Security Glossary, Version 2, RFC 4949, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13
^Maini, Anil Kumar (2007). Digital Electronics: Principles, Devices and Applications. John Wiley and Sons. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-470-03214-5. In addition, it defines codes for 33 nonprinting, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how the text is processed.
^Bukstein, Ed (July 1964). "Binary Computer Codes and ASCII". Electronics World. Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. 72 (1): 28–29. Retrieved 2016-05-22.
^ abcdefBemer, Robert William (1980). "Chapter 1: Inside ASCII". General Purpose Software(PDF). Best of Interface Age. 2. Portland, OR, USA: dilithium Press. pp. 1–50. ISBN 0-918398-37-1. LCCN 79-67462. Archived from the original on August 27, 2016. Retrieved 2016-08-27, from:
Bemer, Robert William (May 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part I". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (5): 96–102.
Bemer, Robert William (June 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part II". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (6): 64–74.
Bemer, Robert William (July 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part III". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (7): 80–87.
^Brief Report: Meeting of CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet, May 13–15, 1963.
^Report of ISO/TC/97/SC 2 – Meeting of October 29–31, 1963.
^Report on Task Group X3.2.4, June 11, 1963, Pentagon Building, Washington, DC.
^Report of Meeting No. 8, Task Group X3.2.4, December 17 and 18, 1963
^ abcWinter, Dik T. (2010) [2003]. "US and International standards: ASCII". Archived from the original on 2010-01-16.
^ abcdefgSalste, Tuomas (January 2016). "7-bit character sets: Revisions of ASCII". Aivosto Oy. urn:nbn:fi-fe201201011004. Archived from the original on 2016-06-13. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
^"Information". Scientific American (special edition). 215 (3). September 1966. JSTOR e24931041.
^Korpela, Jukka K. (2014-03-14) [2006-06-07]. Unicode Explained – Internationalize Documents, Programs, and Web Sites (2nd release of 1st ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-596-10121-3. ISBN 0-596-10121-X.
^ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007): American National Standard for Information Systems – Coded Character Sets – 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)(PDF), 2007 [1986], archived (PDF) from the original on 2014-02-07, retrieved 2016-06-12
^Bit Sequencing of the American National Standard Code for Information Interchange in Serial-by-Bit Data Transmission, American National Standards Institute (ANSI), 1966, X3.15-1966
^"BruXy: Radio Teletype communication". 2005-10-10. Retrieved 2016-05-09. The transmitted code use International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA-2) which was introduced by CCITT in 1924.
^ abSmith, Gil (2001). "Teletype Communication Codes" (PDF). Baudot.net. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
^Sawyer, Stanley A.; Krantz, Steven George (1995). A TeX Primer for Scientists. CRC Press, LLC. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-8493-7159-2.
^Savard, John J. G. "Computer Keyboards". Retrieved 2014-08-24.
^"ASCIIbetical definition". PC Magazine. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^Resnick, P. (April 2001), Internet Message Format, RFC 2822, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13 (NB. NO-WS-CTL.)
^Barry Margolin (May 29, 2014). "Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs)". help-gnu-emacs (Mailing list).
^ ab"PDP-6 Multiprogramming System Manual" (PDF). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1965. p. 43.
^ ab"PDP-10 Reference Handbook, Book 3, Communicating with the Monitor" (PDF). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1969. p. 5-5.
^"Help - GNU Emacs Manual".
^Tim Paterson (August 8, 2007). "Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M?". DosMan Drivel.
^Ossanna, J. F.; Saltzer, J. H. (November 17–19, 1970). "Technical and human engineering problems in connecting terminals to a time-sharing system" (PDF). Proceedings of the November 17–19, 1970, Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC). p. 357: AFIPS Press. pp. 355–362. Using a "new-line" function (combined carriage-return and line-feed) is simpler for both man and machine than requiring both functions for starting a new line; the American National Standard X3.4-1968 permits the line-feed code to carry the new-line meaning.
^O'Sullivan, T. (1971-05-19), TELNET Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), pp. 4–5, RFC 158, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^Neigus, Nancy J. (1973-08-12), File Transfer Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), RFC 542, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^Postel, Jon (June 1980), File Transfer Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), RFC 765, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^"EOL translation plan for Mercurial". Mercurial. Retrieved 2017-06-24.
^Bernstein, Daniel J. "Bare LFs in SMTP". Retrieved 2013-01-28.
^CP/M 1.4 Interface Guide(PDF). Digital Research. 1978. p. 10.
^Cerf, Vinton Gray (1969-10-16), ASCII format for Network Interchange, Network Working Group, RFC 20, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13 (NB. Almost identical wording to USAS X3.4-1968 except for the intro.)
^Haynes, Jim (2015-01-13). "First-Hand: Chad is Our Most Important Product: An Engineer's Memory of Teletype Corporation". Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW). Archived from the original on October 31, 2016. Retrieved 2016-10-31. There was the change from 1961 ASCII to 1968 ASCII. Some computer languages used characters in 1961 ASCII such as up arrow and left arrow. These characters disappeared from 1968 ASCII. We worked with Fred Mocking, who by now was in Sales at Teletype, on a type cylinder that would compromise the changing characters so that the meanings of 1961 ASCII were not totally lost. The underscore character was made rather wedge-shaped so it could also serve as a left arrow.
^Bemer, Robert William. "Bemer meets Europe (Computer Standards) – Computer History Vignettes". Trailing-edge.com. Archived from the original on 2013-10-17. Retrieved 2008-04-14. (NB. Bemer was employed at IBM at that time.)
^"Robert William Bemer: Biography". 2013-03-09. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16.
^Johnson, Lyndon Baines (1968-03-11). "Memorandum Approving the Adoption by the Federal Government of a Standard Code for Information Interchange". The American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^Richard S. Shuford (December 20, 1996). "Re: Early history of ASCII?". Newsgroup: alt.folklore.computers. Usenet: Pine.SUN.3.91.961220100220.13180C-100000@duncan.cs.utk.edu.
^Folts, Harold C.; Karp, Harry, eds. (1982-02-01). Compilation of Data Communications Standards (2nd revised ed.). McGraw-Hill Inc. ISBN 0-07-021457-3. ISBN 978-0-07-021457-6.
^Dubost, Karl (2008-05-06). "UTF-8 Growth on the Web". W3C Blog. World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^ abDavis, Mark (2008-05-05). "Moving to Unicode 5.1". Official Google Blog. Google. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^Davis, Mark (2010-01-28). "Unicode nearing 50% of the web". Official Google Blog. Google. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^"Specific Criteria", attachment to memo from R. W. Reach, "X3-2 Meeting – September 14 and 15", September 18, 1961
^Maréchal, R. (1967-12-22), ISO/TC 97 – Computers and Information Processing: Acceptance of Draft ISO Recommendation No. 1052
^The Unicode Consortium (2006-10-27). "Chapter 13: Special Areas and Format Characters" (PDF). In Allen, Julie D. The Unicode standard, Version 5.0. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, US: Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 314. ISBN 0-321-48091-0. Retrieved 2015-03-13.
^"utf-8(7) – Linux manual page". Man7.org. 2014-02-26. Retrieved 2014-04-21.
Further reading
Bemer, Robert William (1960). "A Proposal for Character Code Compatibility". Communications of the ACM. 3 (2): 71–72. doi:10.1145/366959.366961.
Bemer, Robert William (2003-05-23). "The Babel of Codes Prior to ASCII: The 1960 Survey of Coded Character Sets: The Reasons for ASCII". Archived from the original on 2013-10-17. Retrieved 2016-05-09, from:
Bemer, Robert William (December 1960). "Survey of coded character representation". Communications of the ACM. 3 (12): 639–641. doi:10.1145/367487.367493.
Smith, H. J.; Williams, F. A. (December 1960). "Survey of punched card codes". Communications of the ACM. 3 (12): 642. doi:10.1145/367487.367491.
American National Standard Code for Information Interchange. American National Standards Institute. 1977.
Robinson, G. S.; Cargill, C. (1996). "History and impact of computer standards". Computer. 29 (10): 79–85. doi:10.1109/2.539725.
Mullendore, Ralph Elvin (1964) [1963]. Ptak, John F., ed. "On the Early Development of ASCII – The History of ASCII". JF Ptak Science Books (published March 2012). Archived from the original on 2016-05-26. Retrieved 2016-05-26.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to ASCII.
"C0 Controls and Basic Latin – Range: 0000–007F" (PDF). The Unicode Standard 8.0. Unicode, Inc. 2015 [1991]. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-05-26. Retrieved 2016-05-26.
Fischer, Eric. "The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874–1968". Retrieved 2016-05-26. [1]
「ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (formerly ANSI X3.4-1986) American National Standard for Information Systems ― Coded Character Sets ― 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)」American National Standards Institute(1963年6月17日制定、1986年3月26日最終改正、2002年1月15日規格番号変更)
Not to be confused with MS Windows-1252 or other types of extended ASCII.
This article is about the character encoding. For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation).
ASCII
ASCII (1967 or later)
MIME / IANA
us-ascii
Alias(es)
ASCII
Language(s)
English
Classification
ISO 646 series
Extensions
Unicode
ISO 8859 (series)
KOI-8
OEM (series)
Windows-125x (series)
Others
Preceded by
ITA 2, FIELDATA
Succeeded by
ISO 8859, Unicode
Other related encoding(s)
PETSCII
v
t
e
ASCII (/ˈæskiː/(listen)ASS-kee),[1]:6 abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.
ASCII is the traditional name for the encoding system; the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the updated name US-ASCII, which clarifies that this system was developed in the US and based on the typographical symbols predominantly in use there.[2]
ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones.
ASCII chart from an earlier-than 1972 printer manual (b1 is the least significant bit.)
Contents
1Overview
2History
3Design considerations
3.1Bit width
3.2Internal organization
3.3Character order
4Character groups
4.1Control characters
4.2Printable characters
4.3Character set
5Use
6Variants and derivations
6.17-bit codes
6.28-bit codes
6.3Unicode
7See also
8Notes
9References
10Further reading
11External links
Overview
ASCII was developed from telegraph code. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963,[3][4] underwent a major revision during 1967,[5][6] and experienced its most recent update during 1986.[7] Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.
Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above.[8] Ninety-five of the encoded characters are printable: these include the digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and punctuation symbols. In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype machines; most of these are now obsolete,[9] although a few are still commonly used, such as the carriage return, line feed and tab codes.
For example, lowercase i would be represented in the ASCII encoding by binary 1101001 = hexadecimal 69 (i is the ninth letter) = decimal 105.
History
ASCII (1963). Control pictures of equivalent controls are shown where they exist, or a grey dot otherwise.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association (ASA), called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee's X3.2.4 working group (now INCITS). The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI)[1]:211 and ultimately the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
With the other special characters and control codes filled in, ASCII was published as ASA X3.4-1963,[4][10] leaving 28 code positions without any assigned meaning, reserved for future standardization, and one unassigned control code.[1]:66, 245 There was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet.[1]:435 The indecision did not last long: during May 1963 the CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet proposed to assign lowercase characters to sticks[a][11] 6 and 7,[12] and International Organization for Standardization TC 97 SC 2 voted during October to incorporate the change into its draft standard.[13] The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting.[14] Locating the lowercase letters in sticks[a][11] 6 and 7 caused the characters to differ in bit pattern from the upper case by a single bit, which simplified case-insensitive character matching and the construction of keyboards and printers.
The X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters (the brace and vertical bar characters),[15] renaming some control characters (SOM became start of header (SOH)) and moving or removing others (RU was removed).[1]:247–248 ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3.4-1967,[5][16] then USAS X3.4-1968, ANSI X3.4-1977, and finally, ANSI X3.4-1986.[7][17]
Revisions of the ASCII standard:
ASA X3.4-1963[1][4][16][17]
ASA X3.4-1965 (approved, but not published, nevertheless used by IBM 2260 & 2265 Display Stations and IBM 2848 Display Control)[1]:423, 425–428, 435–439[18][16][17]
USAS X3.4-1967[1][5][17]
USAS X3.4-1968[1][17]
ANSI X3.4-1977[17]
ANSI X3.4-1986[7][17]
ANSI X3.4-1986 (R1992)
ANSI X3.4-1986 (R1997)
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2002)[19]
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007)[20]
ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2012)
In the X3.15 standard, the X3 committee also addressed how ASCII should be transmitted (least significant bit first),[1]:249–253[21] and how it should be recorded on perforated tape. They proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats.
Design considerations
Bit width
The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems. Like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols (i.e. graphemes and control characters). This allows digital devices to communicate with each other and to process, store, and communicate character-oriented information such as written language. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters, 10 numerical digits, and from 11 to 25 special graphic symbols. To include all these, and control characters compatible with the Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT) International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) standard of 1924,[22][23] FIELDATA (1956[citation needed]), and early EBCDIC (1963), more than 64 codes were required for ASCII.
ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874.[23]
The committee debated the possibility of a shift function (like in ITA2), which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the following character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is less reliable for data transmission, as an error in transmitting the shift code typically makes a long part of the transmission unreadable. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code.[1]:215, 236 § 4
The committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits (octets) would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal. However, it would require all data transmission to send eight bits when seven could suffice. The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission. Since perforated tape at the time could record eight bits in one position, it also allowed for a parity bit for error checking if desired.[1]:217, 236 § 5 Eight-bit machines (with octets as the native data type) that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0.[24] In some printers, the high bit was used to enable Italics printing.
Internal organization
The code itself was patterned so that most control codes were together and all graphic codes were together, for ease of identification. The first two so called ASCII sticks[a][11] (32 positions) were reserved for control characters.[1]:220, 236 § 8,9) The "space" character had to come before graphics to make sorting easier, so it became position 20hex;[1]:237 § 10 for the same reason, many special signs commonly used as separators were placed before digits. The committee decided it was important to support uppercase 64-character alphabets, and chose to pattern ASCII so it could be reduced easily to a usable 64-character set of graphic codes,[1]:228, 237 § 14 as was done in the DEC SIXBIT code (1963). Lowercase letters were therefore not interleaved with uppercase. To keep options available for lowercase letters and other graphics, the special and numeric codes were arranged before the letters, and the letter A was placed in position 41hex to match the draft of the corresponding British standard.[1]:238 § 18 The digits 0–9 are prefixed with 011, but the remaining 4 bits correspond to their respective values in binary, making conversion with binary-coded decimal straightforward.
Many of the non-alphanumeric characters were positioned to correspond to their shifted position on typewriters; an important subtlety is that these were based on mechanical typewriters, not electric typewriters.[25] Mechanical typewriters followed the standard set by the Remington No. 2 (1878), the first typewriter with a shift key, and the shifted values of 23456789- were "#$%_&'() – early typewriters omitted 0 and 1, using O (capital letter o) and l (lowercase letter L) instead, but 1! and 0) pairs became standard once 0 and 1 became common. Thus, in ASCII !"#$% were placed in the second stick,[a][11] positions 1–5, corresponding to the digits 1–5 in the adjacent stick.[a][11] The parentheses could not correspond to 9 and 0, however, because the place corresponding to 0 was taken by the space character. This was accommodated by removing _ (underscore) from 6 and shifting the remaining characters, which corresponded to many European typewriters that placed the parentheses with 8 and 9. This discrepancy from typewriters led to bit-paired keyboards, notably the Teletype Model 33, which used the left-shifted layout corresponding to ASCII, not to traditional mechanical typewriters. Electric typewriters, notably the IBM Selectric (1961), used a somewhat different layout that has become standard on computers – following the IBM PC (1981), especially Model M (1984) – and thus shift values for symbols on modern keyboards do not correspond as closely to the ASCII table as earlier keyboards did. The /? pair also dates to the No. 2, and the ,< .> pairs were used on some keyboards (others, including the No. 2, did not shift , (comma) or . (full stop) so they could be used in uppercase without unshifting). However, ASCII split the ;: pair (dating to No. 2), and rearranged mathematical symbols (varied conventions, commonly -* =+) to :* ;+ -=.
Some common characters were not included, notably ½¼¢, while ^`~ were included as diacritics for international use, and <> for mathematical use, together with the simple line characters \| (in addition to common /). The @ symbol was not used in continental Europe and the committee expected it would be replaced by an accented À in the French variation, so the @ was placed in position 40hex, right before the letter A.[1]:243
The control codes felt essential for data transmission were the start of message (SOM), end of address (EOA), end of message (EOM), end of transmission (EOT), "who are you?" (WRU), "are you?" (RU), a reserved device control (DC0), synchronous idle (SYNC), and acknowledge (ACK). These were positioned to maximize the Hamming distance between their bit patterns.[1]:243–245
Character order
ASCII-code order is also called ASCIIbetical order.[26] Collation of data is sometimes done in this order rather than "standard" alphabetical order (collating sequence). The main deviations in ASCII order are:
All uppercase come before lowercase letters; for example, "Z" precedes "a"
Digits and many punctuation marks come before letters
An intermediate order converts uppercase letters to lowercase before comparing ASCII values.
Character groups
Control characters
Main article: Control character
ASCII reserves the first 32 codes (numbers 0–31 decimal) for control characters: codes originally intended not to represent printable information, but rather to control devices (such as printers) that make use of ASCII, or to provide meta-information about data streams such as those stored on magnetic tape.
For example, character 10 represents the "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance its paper), and character 8 represents "backspace". RFC 2822 refers to control characters that do not include carriage return, line feed or white space as non-whitespace control characters.[27] Except for the control characters that prescribe elementary line-oriented formatting, ASCII does not define any mechanism for describing the structure or appearance of text within a document. Other schemes, such as markup languages, address page and document layout and formatting.
The original ASCII standard used only short descriptive phrases for each control character. The ambiguity this caused was sometimes intentional, for example where a character would be used slightly differently on a terminal link than on a data stream, and sometimes accidental, for example with the meaning of "delete".
Probably the most influential single device on the interpretation of these characters was the Teletype Model 33 ASR, which was a printing terminal with an available paper tape reader/punch option. Paper tape was a very popular medium for long-term program storage until the 1980s, less costly and in some ways less fragile than magnetic tape. In particular, the Teletype Model 33 machine assignments for codes 17 (Control-Q, DC1, also known as XON), 19 (Control-S, DC3, also known as XOFF), and 127 (Delete) became de facto standards. The Model 33 was also notable for taking the description of Control-G (code 7, BEL, meaning audibly alert the operator) literally, as the unit contained an actual bell which it rang when it received a BEL character. Because the keytop for the O key also showed a left-arrow symbol (from ASCII-1963, which had this character instead of underscore), a noncompliant use of code 15 (Control-O, Shift In) interpreted as "delete previous character" was also adopted by many early timesharing systems but eventually became neglected.
When a Teletype 33 ASR equipped with the automatic paper tape reader received a Control-S (XOFF, an abbreviation for transmit off), it caused the tape reader to stop; receiving Control-Q (XON, "transmit on") caused the tape reader to resume. This technique became adopted by several early computer operating systems as a "handshaking" signal warning a sender to stop transmission because of impending overflow; it persists to this day in many systems as a manual output control technique. On some systems Control-S retains its meaning but Control-Q is replaced by a second Control-S to resume output. The 33 ASR also could be configured to employ Control-R (DC2) and Control-T (DC4) to start and stop the tape punch; on some units equipped with this function, the corresponding control character lettering on the keycap above the letter was TAPE and TAPE respectively.[28]
The Teletype could not move the head backwards, so it did not put a key on the keyboard to send a BS (backspace). Instead there was a key marked "rubout" that sent code 127 (DEL). The purpose of this key was to erase mistakes in a hand-typed paper tape: the operator had to push a button on the tape punch to back it up, then type the rubout, which punched all holes and replaced the mistake with a character that was intended to be ignored.[29] Teletypes were commonly used for the less-expensive computers from Digital Equipment Corporation, so these systems had to use the available key and thus the DEL code to erase the previous character.[30][31] Because of this, DEC video terminals (by default) sent the DEL code for the key marked "Backspace" while the key marked "Delete" sent an escape sequence, while many other terminals sent BS for the Backspace key. The Unix terminal driver could only use one code to back up, this could be set to BS or DEL, but not both, resulting in a very long period of annoyance where you had to correct it depending on what terminal you were using (modern shells using readline understand both codes). The assumption that no key sent a BS caused Control+H to be used for other purposes, such as a "help" command in Emacs.[32]
Many more of the control codes have been given meanings quite different from their original ones. The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning. This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning. Over time this meaning has been co-opted and has eventually been changed. In modern use, an ESC sent to the terminal usually indicates the start of a command sequence usually in the form of a so-called "ANSI escape code" (or, more properly, a "Control Sequence Introducer") from ECMA-48 (1972) and its successors, beginning with ESC followed by a "[" (left-bracket) character. An ESC sent from the terminal is most often used as an out-of-band character used to terminate an operation, as in the TECO and vi text editors. In graphical user interface (GUI) and windowing systems, ESC generally causes an application to abort its current operation or to exit (terminate) altogether.
The inherent ambiguity of many control characters, combined with their historical usage, created problems when transferring "plain text" files between systems. The best example of this is the newline problem on various operating systems. Teletype machines required that a line of text be terminated with both "Carriage Return" (which moves the printhead to the beginning of the line) and "Line Feed" (which advances the paper one line without moving the printhead). The name "Carriage Return" comes from the fact that on a manual typewriter the carriage holding the paper moved while the position where the typebars struck the ribbon remained stationary. The entire carriage had to be pushed (returned) to the right in order to position the left margin of the paper for the next line.
DEC operating systems (OS/8, RT-11, RSX-11, RSTS, TOPS-10, etc.) used both characters to mark the end of a line so that the console device (originally Teletype machines) would work. By the time so-called "glass TTYs" (later called CRTs or terminals) came along, the convention was so well established that backward compatibility necessitated continuing the convention. When Gary Kildall created CP/M he was inspired by some command line interface conventions used in DEC's RT-11. Until the introduction of PC DOS in 1981, IBM had no hand in this because their 1970s operating systems used EBCDIC instead of ASCII and they were oriented toward punch-card input and line printer output on which the concept of carriage return was meaningless. IBM's PC DOS (also marketed as MS-DOS by Microsoft) inherited the convention by virtue of being loosely based on CP/M,[33] and Windows inherited it from MS-DOS.
Unfortunately, requiring two characters to mark the end of a line introduces unnecessary complexity and questions as to how to interpret each character when encountered alone. To simplify matters plain text data streams, including files, on Multics[34] used line feed (LF) alone as a line terminator. Unix and Unix-like systems, and Amiga systems, adopted this convention from Multics. The original Macintosh OS, Apple DOS, and ProDOS, on the other hand, used carriage return (CR) alone as a line terminator; however, since Apple replaced these operating systems with the Unix-based macOS operating system, they now use line feed (LF) as well. The Radio Shack TRS-80 also used a lone CR to terminate lines.
Computers attached to the ARPANET included machines running operating systems such as TOPS-10 and TENEX using CR-LF line endings, machines running operating systems such as Multics using LF line endings, and machines running operating systems such as OS/360 that represented lines as a character count followed by the characters of the line and that used EBCDIC rather than ASCII. The Telnet protocol defined an ASCII "Network Virtual Terminal" (NVT), so that connections between hosts with different line-ending conventions and character sets could be supported by transmitting a standard text format over the network. Telnet used ASCII along with CR-LF line endings, and software using other conventions would translate between the local conventions and the NVT.[35] The File Transfer Protocol adopted the Telnet protocol, including use of the Network Virtual Terminal, for use when transmitting commands and transferring data in the default ASCII mode.[36][37] This adds complexity to implementations of those protocols, and to other network protocols, such as those used for E-mail and the World Wide Web, on systems not using the NVT's CR-LF line-ending convention.[38][39]
The PDP-6 monitor,[30] and its PDP-10 successor TOPS-10,[31] used Control-Z (SUB) as an end-of-file indication for input from a terminal. Some operating systems such as CP/M tracked file length only in units of disk blocks and used Control-Z to mark the end of the actual text in the file.[40] For these reasons, EOF, or end-of-file, was used colloquially and conventionally as a three-letter acronym for Control-Z instead of SUBstitute. The end-of-text code (ETX), also known as Control-C, was inappropriate for a variety of reasons, while using Z as the control code to end a file is analogous to it ending the alphabet and serves as a very convenient mnemonic aid. A historically common and still prevalent convention uses the ETX code convention to interrupt and halt a program via an input data stream, usually from a keyboard.
In C library and Unix conventions, the null character is used to terminate text strings; such null-terminated strings can be known in abbreviation as ASCIZ or ASCIIZ, where here Z stands for "zero".
Binary
Oct
Dec
Hex
Abbreviation
[b]
[c]
[d]
Name (1967)
1963
1965
1967
000 0000
000
0
00
NULL
NUL
␀
^@
Null
000 0001
001
1
01
SOM
SOH
␁
^A
Start of Heading
000 0010
002
2
02
EOA
STX
␂
^B
Start of Text
000 0011
003
3
03
EOM
ETX
␃
^C
End of Text
000 0100
004
4
04
EOT
␄
^D
End of Transmission
000 0101
005
5
05
WRU
ENQ
␅
^E
Enquiry
000 0110
006
6
06
RU
ACK
␆
^F
Acknowledgement
000 0111
007
7
07
BELL
BEL
␇
^G
\a
Bell
000 1000
010
8
08
FE0
BS
␈
^H
\b
Backspace[e][f]
000 1001
011
9
09
HT/SK
HT
␉
^I
\t
Horizontal Tab[g]
000 1010
012
10
0A
LF
␊
^J
\n
Line Feed
000 1011
013
11
0B
VTAB
VT
␋
^K
\v
Vertical Tab
000 1100
014
12
0C
FF
␌
^L
\f
Form Feed
000 1101
015
13
0D
CR
␍
^M
\r
Carriage Return[h]
000 1110
016
14
0E
SO
␎
^N
Shift Out
000 1111
017
15
0F
SI
␏
^O
Shift In
001 0000
020
16
10
DC0
DLE
␐
^P
Data Link Escape
001 0001
021
17
11
DC1
␑
^Q
Device Control 1 (often XON)
001 0010
022
18
12
DC2
␒
^R
Device Control 2
001 0011
023
19
13
DC3
␓
^S
Device Control 3 (often XOFF)
001 0100
024
20
14
DC4
␔
^T
Device Control 4
001 0101
025
21
15
ERR
NAK
␕
^U
Negative Acknowledgement
001 0110
026
22
16
SYNC
SYN
␖
^V
Synchronous Idle
001 0111
027
23
17
LEM
ETB
␗
^W
End of Transmission Block
001 1000
030
24
18
S0
CAN
␘
^X
Cancel
001 1001
031
25
19
S1
EM
␙
^Y
End of Medium
001 1010
032
26
1A
S2
SS
SUB
␚
^Z
Substitute
001 1011
033
27
1B
S3
ESC
␛
^[
\e[i]
Escape[j]
001 1100
034
28
1C
S4
FS
␜
^\
File Separator
001 1101
035
29
1D
S5
GS
␝
^]
Group Separator
001 1110
036
30
1E
S6
RS
␞
^^[k]
Record Separator
001 1111
037
31
1F
S7
US
␟
^_
Unit Separator
111 1111
177
127
7F
DEL
␡
^?
Delete[l][f]
Other representations might be used by specialist equipment, for example ISO 2047 graphics or hexadecimal numbers.
Printable characters
Codes 20hex to 7Ehex, known as the printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few miscellaneous symbols. There are 95 printable characters in total.[m]
Code 20hex, the "space" character, denotes the space between words, as produced by the space bar of a keyboard. Since the space character is considered an invisible graphic (rather than a control character)[1]:223[41] it is listed in the table below instead of in the previous section.
Code 7Fhex corresponds to the non-printable "delete" (DEL) control character and is therefore omitted from this chart; it is covered in the previous section's chart. Earlier versions of ASCII used the up arrow instead of the caret (5Ehex) and the left arrow instead of the underscore (5Fhex).[4][42]
Binary
Oct
Dec
Hex
Glyph
1963
1965
1967
010 0000
040
32
20
space
010 0001
041
33
21
!
010 0010
042
34
22
"
010 0011
043
35
23
#
010 0100
044
36
24
$
010 0101
045
37
25
%
010 0110
046
38
26
&
010 0111
047
39
27
'
010 1000
050
40
28
(
010 1001
051
41
29
)
010 1010
052
42
2A
*
010 1011
053
43
2B
+
010 1100
054
44
2C
,
010 1101
055
45
2D
-
010 1110
056
46
2E
.
010 1111
057
47
2F
/
011 0000
060
48
30
0
011 0001
061
49
31
1
011 0010
062
50
32
2
011 0011
063
51
33
3
011 0100
064
52
34
4
011 0101
065
53
35
5
011 0110
066
54
36
6
011 0111
067
55
37
7
011 1000
070
56
38
8
011 1001
071
57
39
9
011 1010
072
58
3A
:
011 1011
073
59
3B
;
011 1100
074
60
3C
<
011 1101
075
61
3D
=
011 1110
076
62
3E
>
011 1111
077
63
3F
?
100 0000
100
64
40
@
`
@
100 0001
101
65
41
A
100 0010
102
66
42
B
100 0011
103
67
43
C
100 0100
104
68
44
D
100 0101
105
69
45
E
100 0110
106
70
46
F
100 0111
107
71
47
G
100 1000
110
72
48
H
100 1001
111
73
49
I
100 1010
112
74
4A
J
100 1011
113
75
4B
K
100 1100
114
76
4C
L
100 1101
115
77
4D
M
100 1110
116
78
4E
N
100 1111
117
79
4F
O
101 0000
120
80
50
P
101 0001
121
81
51
Q
101 0010
122
82
52
R
101 0011
123
83
53
S
101 0100
124
84
54
T
101 0101
125
85
55
U
101 0110
126
86
56
V
101 0111
127
87
57
W
101 1000
130
88
58
X
101 1001
131
89
59
Y
101 1010
132
90
5A
Z
101 1011
133
91
5B
[
101 1100
134
92
5C
\
~
\
101 1101
135
93
5D
]
101 1110
136
94
5E
↑
^
101 1111
137
95
5F
←
_
110 0000
140
96
60
@
`
110 0001
141
97
61
a
110 0010
142
98
62
b
110 0011
143
99
63
c
110 0100
144
100
64
d
110 0101
145
101
65
e
110 0110
146
102
66
f
110 0111
147
103
67
g
110 1000
150
104
68
h
110 1001
151
105
69
i
110 1010
152
106
6A
j
110 1011
153
107
6B
k
110 1100
154
108
6C
l
110 1101
155
109
6D
m
110 1110
156
110
6E
n
110 1111
157
111
6F
o
111 0000
160
112
70
p
111 0001
161
113
71
q
111 0010
162
114
72
r
111 0011
163
115
73
s
111 0100
164
116
74
t
111 0101
165
117
75
u
111 0110
166
118
76
v
111 0111
167
119
77
w
111 1000
170
120
78
x
111 1001
171
121
79
y
111 1010
172
122
7A
z
111 1011
173
123
7B
{
111 1100
174
124
7C
ACK
¬
|
111 1101
175
125
7D
}
111 1110
176
126
7E
ESC
|
~
Character set
ASCII (1977/1986)
_0
_1
_2
_3
_4
_5
_6
_7
_8
_9
_A
_B
_C
_D
_E
_F
0_ 0
NUL 0000
SOH 0001
STX 0002
ETX 0003
EOT 0004
ENQ 0005
ACK 0006
BEL 0007
BS 0008
HT 0009
LF 000A
VT 000B
FF 000C
CR 000D
SO 000E
SI 000F
1_ 16
DLE 0010
DC1 0011
DC2 0012
DC3 0013
DC4 0014
NAK 0015
SYN 0016
ETB 0017
CAN 0018
EM 0019
SUB 001A
ESC 001B
FS 001C
GS 001D
RS 001E
US 001F
2_ 32
SP 0020
! 0021
" 0022
# 0023
$ 0024
% 0025
& 0026
' 0027
( 0028
) 0029
* 002A
+ 002B
, 002C
- 002D
. 002E
/ 002F
3_ 48
0 0030
1 0031
2 0032
3 0033
4 0034
5 0035
6 0036
7 0037
8 0038
9 0039
: 003A
; 003B
< 003C
= 003D
> 003E
? 003F
4_ 64
@ 0040
A 0041
B 0042
C 0043
D 0044
E 0045
F 0046
G 0047
H 0048
I 0049
J 004A
K 004B
L 004C
M 004D
N 004E
O 004F
5_ 80
P 0050
Q 0051
R 0052
S 0053
T 0054
U 0055
V 0056
W 0057
X 0058
Y 0059
Z 005A
[ 005B
\ 005C
] 005D
^ 005E
_ 005F
6_ 96
` 0060
a 0061
b 0062
c 0063
d 0064
e 0065
f 0066
g 0067
h 0068
i 0069
j 006A
k 006B
l 006C
m 006D
n 006E
o 006F
7_ 112
p 0070
q 0071
r 0072
s 0073
t 0074
u 0075
v 0076
w 0077
x 0078
y 0079
z 007A
{ 007B
| 007C
} 007D
~ 007E
DEL 007F
Letter Number Punctuation Symbol Other undefined Changed from 1963 version
Use
ASCII was first used commercially during 1963 as a seven-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX (TeletypeWriter eXchange) network. TWX originally used the earlier five-bit ITA2, which was also used by the competing Telex teleprinter system. Bob Bemer introduced features such as the escape sequence.[3] His British colleague Hugh McGregor Ross helped to popularize this work – according to Bemer, "so much so that the code that was to become ASCII was first called the Bemer–Ross Code in Europe".[43] Because of his extensive work on ASCII, Bemer has been called "the father of ASCII".[44]
On March 11, 1968, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all computers purchased by the United States Federal Government support ASCII, stating:[45][46][47]
I have also approved recommendations of the Secretary of Commerce [Luther H. Hodges] regarding standards for recording the Standard Code for Information Interchange on magnetic tapes and paper tapes when they are used in computer operations.
All computers and related equipment configurations brought into the Federal Government inventory on and after July 1, 1969, must have the capability to use the Standard Code for Information Interchange and the formats prescribed by the magnetic tape and paper tape standards when these media are used.
ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when UTF-8 encoding surpassed it; UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII.[48][49][50]
Variants and derivations
As computer technology spread throughout the world, different standards bodies and corporations developed many variations of ASCII to facilitate the expression of non-English languages that used Roman-based alphabets. One could class some of these variations as "ASCII extensions", although some misuse that term to represent all variants, including those that do not preserve ASCII's character-map in the 7-bit range. Furthermore, the ASCII extensions have also been mislabelled as ASCII.
7-bit codes
Main articles: ECMA-6, ISO/IEC 646, and ITU T.50
See also: UTF-7
From early in its development,[51] ASCII was intended to be just one of several national variants of an international character code standard.
Other international standards bodies have ratified character encodings such as ISO 646 (1967) that are identical or nearly identical to ASCII, with extensions for characters outside the English alphabet and symbols used outside the United States, such as the symbol for the United Kingdom's pound sterling (£). Almost every country needed an adapted version of ASCII, since ASCII suited the needs of only the US and a few other countries. For example, Canada had its own version that supported French characters.
Many other countries developed variants of ASCII to include non-English letters (e.g. é, ñ, ß, Ł), currency symbols (e.g. £, ¥), etc. See also YUSCII (Yugoslavia).
It would share most characters in common, but assign other locally useful characters to several code points reserved for "national use". However, the four years that elapsed between the publication of ASCII-1963 and ISO's first acceptance of an international recommendation during 1967[52] caused ASCII's choices for the national use characters to seem to be de facto standards for the world, causing confusion and incompatibility once other countries did begin to make their own assignments to these code points.
ISO/IEC 646, like ASCII, is a 7-bit character set. It does not make any additional codes available, so the same code points encoded different characters in different countries. Escape codes were defined to indicate which national variant applied to a piece of text, but they were rarely used, so it was often impossible to know what variant to work with and, therefore, which character a code represented, and in general, text-processing systems could cope with only one variant anyway.
Because the bracket and brace characters of ASCII were assigned to "national use" code points that were used for accented letters in other national variants of ISO/IEC 646, a German, French, or Swedish, etc. programmer using their national variant of ISO/IEC 646, rather than ASCII, had to write, and thus read, something such as
ä aÄiÜ = 'Ön'; ü
instead of
{ a[i] = '\n'; }
C trigraphs were created to solve this problem for ANSI C, although their late introduction and inconsistent implementation in compilers limited their use. Many programmers kept their computers on US-ASCII, so plain-text in Swedish, German etc. (for example, in e-mail or Usenet) contained "{, }" and similar variants in the middle of words, something those programmers got used to. For example, a Swedish programmer mailing another programmer asking if they should go for lunch, could get "N{ jag har sm|rg}sar" as the answer, which should be "Nä jag har smörgåsar" meaning "No I've got sandwiches".
8-bit codes
Main articles: Extended ASCII and ISO/IEC 8859
See also: UTF-8
Eventually, as 8-, 16- and 32-bit (and later 64-bit) computers began to replace 12-, 18- and 36-bit computers as the norm, it became common to use an 8-bit byte to store each character in memory, providing an opportunity for extended, 8-bit relatives of ASCII. In most cases these developed as true extensions of ASCII, leaving the original character-mapping intact, but adding additional character definitions after the first 128 (i.e., 7-bit) characters.
Encodings include ISCII (India), VISCII (Vietnam). Although these encodings are sometimes referred to as ASCII, true ASCII is defined strictly only by the ANSI standard.
Most early home computer systems developed their own 8-bit character sets containing line-drawing and game glyphs, and often filled in some or all of the control characters from 0 to 31 with more graphics. Kaypro CP/M computers used the "upper" 128 characters for the Greek alphabet.
The PETSCII code Commodore International used for their 8-bit systems is probably unique among post-1970 codes in being based on ASCII-1963, instead of the more common ASCII-1967, such as found on the ZX Spectrum computer. Atari 8-bit computers and Galaksija computers also used ASCII variants.
The IBM PC defined code page 437, which replaced the control characters with graphic symbols such as smiley faces, and mapped additional graphic characters to the upper 128 positions. Operating systems such as DOS supported these code pages, and manufacturers of IBM PCs supported them in hardware. Digital Equipment Corporation developed the Multinational Character Set (DEC-MCS) for use in the popular VT220 terminal as one of the first extensions designed more for international languages than for block graphics. The Macintosh defined Mac OS Roman and Postscript also defined a set, both of these contained both international letters and typographic punctuation marks instead of graphics, more like modern character sets.
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard (derived from the DEC-MCS) finally provided a standard that most systems copied (at least as accurately as they copied ASCII, but with many substitutions). A popular further extension designed by Microsoft, Windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1), added the typographic punctuation marks needed for traditional text printing. ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and the original 7-bit ASCII were the most common character encodings until 2008 when UTF-8 became more common.[49]
ISO/IEC 4873 introduced 32 additional control codes defined in the 80–9F hexadecimal range, as part of extending the 7-bit ASCII encoding to become an 8-bit system.[53]
Unicode
Main articles: Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646
See also: Basic Latin (Unicode block)
Unicode and the ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Character Set (UCS) have a much wider array of characters and their various encoding forms have begun to supplant ISO/IEC 8859 and ASCII rapidly in many environments. While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Unicode and the UCS support more characters by separating the concepts of unique identification (using natural numbers called code points) and encoding (to 8-, 16- or 32-bit binary formats, called UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32).
ASCII was incorporated into the Unicode (1991) character set as the first 128 symbols, so the 7-bit ASCII characters have the same numeric codes in both sets. This allows UTF-8 to be backward compatible with 7-bit ASCII, as a UTF-8 file containing only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file containing the same sequence of characters. Even more importantly, forward compatibility is ensured as software that recognizes only 7-bit ASCII characters as special and does not alter bytes with the highest bit set (as is often done to support 8-bit ASCII extensions such as ISO-8859-1) will preserve UTF-8 data unchanged.[54]
See also
Computing portal
3568 ASCII, an asteroid named after the character encoding
Ascii85
ASCII art
ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Basic Latin (Unicode block) (ASCII as a subset of Unicode)
Extended ASCII
HTML decimal character rendering
List of Unicode characters
Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang which includes a list of common slang names for ASCII characters
List of computer character sets
Alt codes
Notes
^ abcdeThe 128 characters of the 7-bit ASCII character set are divided into eight 16-character groups called sticks 0–7, associated with the three most-significant bits.[11] Depending on the horizontal or vertical representation of the character map, sticks correspond with either table rows or columns.
^The Unicode characters from the area U+2400 to U+2421 reserved for representing control characters when it is necessary to print or display them rather than have them perform their intended function. Some browsers may not display these properly.
^Caret notation is often used to represent control characters on a terminal. On most text terminals, holding down the Ctrl key while typing the second character will type the control character. Sometimes the shift key is not needed, for instance ^@ may be typable with just Ctrl and 2.
^Character escape sequences in C programming language and many other languages influenced by it, such as Java and Perl (though not all implementations necessarily support all escape sequences).
^The Backspace character can also be entered by pressing the ← Backspace key on some systems.
^ abThe ambiguity of Backspace is due to early terminals designed assuming the main use of the keyboard would be to manually punch paper tape while not connected to a computer. To delete the previous character, one had to back up the paper tape punch, which for mechanical and simplicity reasons was a button on the punch itself and not the keyboard, then type the rubout character. They therefore placed a key producing rubout at the location used on typewriters for backspace. When systems used these terminals and provided command-line editing, they had to use the "rubout" code to perform a backspace, and often did not interpret the backspace character (they might echo "^H" for backspace). Other terminals not designed for paper tape made the key at this location produce Backspace, and systems designed for these used that character to back up. Since the delete code often produced a backspace effect, this also forced terminal manufacturers to make any Delete key produce something other than the Delete character.
^The Tab character can also be entered by pressing the Tab ↹ key on most systems.
^The Carriage Return character can also be entered by pressing the ↵ Enter or Return key on most systems.
^The \e escape sequence is not part of ISO C and many other language specifications. However, it is understood by several compilers, including GCC.
^The Escape character can also be entered by pressing the Esc key on some systems.
^^^ means Ctrl+^ (pressing the "Ctrl" and caret keys).
^The Delete character can sometimes be entered by pressing the ← Backspace key on some systems.
^ abcdefghijklmnopqrsMackenzie, Charles E. (1980). Coded Character Sets, History and Development(PDF). The Systems Programming Series (1 ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. pp. 6, 66, 211, 215, 217, 220, 223, 228, 236–238, 243–245, 247–253, 423, 425–428, 435–439. ISBN 0-201-14460-3. LCCN 77-90165. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 26, 2016. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abBrandel, Mary (July 6, 1999). "1963: The Debut of ASCII". CNN. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^ abcd"American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASA X3.4-1963". American Standards Association (ASA). 1963-06-17. Archived from the original on September 28, 2018. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abc"USA Standard Code for Information Interchange, USAS X3.4-1967". United States of America Standards Institute (USASI). July 7, 1967.
^Jennings, Thomas Daniel (2016-04-20) [1999]. "An annotated history of some character codes or ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Infiltration". World Power Systems (WPS). Archived from the original on September 28, 2018. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
^ abc"American National Standard for Information Systems — Coded Character Sets — 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII), ANSI X3.4-1986". American National Standards Institute (ANSI). March 26, 1986.
^Shirley, R. (August 2007), Internet Security Glossary, Version 2, RFC 4949, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13
^Maini, Anil Kumar (2007). Digital Electronics: Principles, Devices and Applications. John Wiley and Sons. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-470-03214-5. In addition, it defines codes for 33 nonprinting, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how the text is processed.
^Bukstein, Ed (July 1964). "Binary Computer Codes and ASCII". Electronics World. Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. 72 (1): 28–29. Retrieved 2016-05-22.
^ abcdefBemer, Robert William (1980). "Chapter 1: Inside ASCII". General Purpose Software(PDF). Best of Interface Age. 2. Portland, OR, USA: dilithium Press. pp. 1–50. ISBN 0-918398-37-1. LCCN 79-67462. Archived from the original on August 27, 2016. Retrieved 2016-08-27, from:
Bemer, Robert William (May 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part I". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (5): 96–102.
Bemer, Robert William (June 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part II". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (6): 64–74.
Bemer, Robert William (July 1978). "Inside ASCII – Part III". Interface Age. Portland, Oregon: dilithium Press. 3 (7): 80–87.
^Brief Report: Meeting of CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet, May 13–15, 1963.
^Report of ISO/TC/97/SC 2 – Meeting of October 29–31, 1963.
^Report on Task Group X3.2.4, June 11, 1963, Pentagon Building, Washington, DC.
^Report of Meeting No. 8, Task Group X3.2.4, December 17 and 18, 1963
^ abcWinter, Dik T. (2010) [2003]. "US and International standards: ASCII". Archived from the original on 2010-01-16.
^ abcdefgSalste, Tuomas (January 2016). "7-bit character sets: Revisions of ASCII". Aivosto Oy. urn:nbn:fi-fe201201011004. Archived from the original on 2016-06-13. Retrieved 2016-06-13.
^"Information". Scientific American (special edition). 215 (3). September 1966. JSTOR e24931041.
^Korpela, Jukka K. (2014-03-14) [2006-06-07]. Unicode Explained – Internationalize Documents, Programs, and Web Sites (2nd release of 1st ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-596-10121-3. ISBN 0-596-10121-X.
^ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007): American National Standard for Information Systems – Coded Character Sets – 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)(PDF), 2007 [1986], archived (PDF) from the original on 2014-02-07, retrieved 2016-06-12
^Bit Sequencing of the American National Standard Code for Information Interchange in Serial-by-Bit Data Transmission, American National Standards Institute (ANSI), 1966, X3.15-1966
^"BruXy: Radio Teletype communication". 2005-10-10. Retrieved 2016-05-09. The transmitted code use International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA-2) which was introduced by CCITT in 1924.
^ abSmith, Gil (2001). "Teletype Communication Codes" (PDF). Baudot.net. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
^Sawyer, Stanley A.; Krantz, Steven George (1995). A TeX Primer for Scientists. CRC Press, LLC. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-8493-7159-2.
^Savard, John J. G. "Computer Keyboards". Retrieved 2014-08-24.
^"ASCIIbetical definition". PC Magazine. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^Resnick, P. (April 2001), Internet Message Format, RFC 2822, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13 (NB. NO-WS-CTL.)
^Barry Margolin (May 29, 2014). "Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs)". help-gnu-emacs (Mailing list).
^ ab"PDP-6 Multiprogramming System Manual" (PDF). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1965. p. 43.
^ ab"PDP-10 Reference Handbook, Book 3, Communicating with the Monitor" (PDF). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1969. p. 5-5.
^"Help - GNU Emacs Manual".
^Tim Paterson (August 8, 2007). "Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M?". DosMan Drivel.
^Ossanna, J. F.; Saltzer, J. H. (November 17–19, 1970). "Technical and human engineering problems in connecting terminals to a time-sharing system" (PDF). Proceedings of the November 17–19, 1970, Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC). p. 357: AFIPS Press. pp. 355–362. Using a "new-line" function (combined carriage-return and line-feed) is simpler for both man and machine than requiring both functions for starting a new line; the American National Standard X3.4-1968 permits the line-feed code to carry the new-line meaning.
^O'Sullivan, T. (1971-05-19), TELNET Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), pp. 4–5, RFC 158, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^Neigus, Nancy J. (1973-08-12), File Transfer Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), RFC 542, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^Postel, Jon (June 1980), File Transfer Protocol, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), RFC 765, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2013-01-28
^"EOL translation plan for Mercurial". Mercurial. Retrieved 2017-06-24.
^Bernstein, Daniel J. "Bare LFs in SMTP". Retrieved 2013-01-28.
^CP/M 1.4 Interface Guide(PDF). Digital Research. 1978. p. 10.
^Cerf, Vinton Gray (1969-10-16), ASCII format for Network Interchange, Network Working Group, RFC 20, archived from the original on 2016-06-13, retrieved 2016-06-13 (NB. Almost identical wording to USAS X3.4-1968 except for the intro.)
^Haynes, Jim (2015-01-13). "First-Hand: Chad is Our Most Important Product: An Engineer's Memory of Teletype Corporation". Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW). Archived from the original on October 31, 2016. Retrieved 2016-10-31. There was the change from 1961 ASCII to 1968 ASCII. Some computer languages used characters in 1961 ASCII such as up arrow and left arrow. These characters disappeared from 1968 ASCII. We worked with Fred Mocking, who by now was in Sales at Teletype, on a type cylinder that would compromise the changing characters so that the meanings of 1961 ASCII were not totally lost. The underscore character was made rather wedge-shaped so it could also serve as a left arrow.
^Bemer, Robert William. "Bemer meets Europe (Computer Standards) – Computer History Vignettes". Trailing-edge.com. Archived from the original on 2013-10-17. Retrieved 2008-04-14. (NB. Bemer was employed at IBM at that time.)
^"Robert William Bemer: Biography". 2013-03-09. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16.
^Johnson, Lyndon Baines (1968-03-11). "Memorandum Approving the Adoption by the Federal Government of a Standard Code for Information Interchange". The American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2008-04-14.
^Richard S. Shuford (December 20, 1996). "Re: Early history of ASCII?". Newsgroup: alt.folklore.computers. Usenet: Pine.SUN.3.91.961220100220.13180C-100000@duncan.cs.utk.edu.
^Folts, Harold C.; Karp, Harry, eds. (1982-02-01). Compilation of Data Communications Standards (2nd revised ed.). McGraw-Hill Inc. ISBN 0-07-021457-3. ISBN 978-0-07-021457-6.
^Dubost, Karl (2008-05-06). "UTF-8 Growth on the Web". W3C Blog. World Wide Web Consortium. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^ abDavis, Mark (2008-05-05). "Moving to Unicode 5.1". Official Google Blog. Google. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^Davis, Mark (2010-01-28). "Unicode nearing 50% of the web". Official Google Blog. Google. Archived from the original on 2016-06-16. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
^"Specific Criteria", attachment to memo from R. W. Reach, "X3-2 Meeting – September 14 and 15", September 18, 1961
^Maréchal, R. (1967-12-22), ISO/TC 97 – Computers and Information Processing: Acceptance of Draft ISO Recommendation No. 1052
^The Unicode Consortium (2006-10-27). "Chapter 13: Special Areas and Format Characters" (PDF). In Allen, Julie D. The Unicode standard, Version 5.0. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, US: Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 314. ISBN 0-321-48091-0. Retrieved 2015-03-13.
^"utf-8(7) – Linux manual page". Man7.org. 2014-02-26. Retrieved 2014-04-21.
Further reading
Bemer, Robert William (1960). "A Proposal for Character Code Compatibility". Communications of the ACM. 3 (2): 71–72. doi:10.1145/366959.366961.
Bemer, Robert William (2003-05-23). "The Babel of Codes Prior to ASCII: The 1960 Survey of Coded Character Sets: The Reasons for ASCII". Archived from the original on 2013-10-17. Retrieved 2016-05-09, from:
Bemer, Robert William (December 1960). "Survey of coded character representation". Communications of the ACM. 3 (12): 639–641. doi:10.1145/367487.367493.
Smith, H. J.; Williams, F. A. (December 1960). "Survey of punched card codes". Communications of the ACM. 3 (12): 642. doi:10.1145/367487.367491.
American National Standard Code for Information Interchange. American National Standards Institute. 1977.
Robinson, G. S.; Cargill, C. (1996). "History and impact of computer standards". Computer. 29 (10): 79–85. doi:10.1109/2.539725.
Mullendore, Ralph Elvin (1964) [1963]. Ptak, John F., ed. "On the Early Development of ASCII – The History of ASCII". JF Ptak Science Books (published March 2012). Archived from the original on 2016-05-26. Retrieved 2016-05-26.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to ASCII.
"C0 Controls and Basic Latin – Range: 0000–007F" (PDF). The Unicode Standard 8.0. Unicode, Inc. 2015 [1991]. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-05-26. Retrieved 2016-05-26.
Fischer, Eric. "The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874–1968". Retrieved 2016-05-26. [1]