Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Verified for the 2026 exam
Verified for the 2026 exam•Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Definition
ASCII code stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard that assigns unique numeric values to represent characters such as letters, numbers, and symbols in computer systems.
The Unicode system is an international character encoding standard that assigns unique numeric values to represent characters from various languages and scripts around the world. It allows computers to handle text in multiple languages more effectively than previous standards like ASCII.
Binary representation: Binary representation refers to expressing data or information using only two digits, 0 and 1. In the case of ASCII code, each character is represented by a unique combination of binary digits.
Character set: A character set is a collection of characters that are recognized and used by computers. The ASCII code defines a specific character set consisting of 128 characters.