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Files that contain machine-executable code and non-textual data typically contain all 256 possible eight-bit byte values. Many computer programs came to rely on this distinction between seven-bit text and eight-bit binary data, and would not function properly if non-ASCII characters appeared in data that was expected to include only ASCII text ...
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 ...
Punched tape with the word "Wikipedia" encoded in ASCII.Presence and absence of a hole represents 1 and 0, respectively; for example, W is encoded as 1010111.. Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. [1]
It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file.
A UTF-8 file that contains only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file. Legacy programs can generally handle UTF-8 encoded files, even if they contain non-ASCII characters. For instance, the C printf function can print a UTF-8 string because it only looks for the ASCII '%' character to define a formatting string. All other bytes are ...
A six-bit character code is a character encoding designed for use on computers with word lengths a multiple of 6. Six bits can only encode 64 distinct characters, so these codes generally include only the upper-case letters, the numerals, some punctuation characters, and sometimes control characters.
Therefore, a word of n bytes can contain up to (2n)−1 decimal digits, which is always an odd number of digits. A decimal number with d digits requires 1 / 2 (d+1) bytes of storage space. For example, a 4-byte (32-bit) word can hold seven decimal digits plus a sign and can represent values ranging from ±9,999,999.
In IBM terminology, the low-order four bits of a byte in storage are called the digit, and the high-order four bits are the zone. [4] The digit bits contain the numeric value 0–9. The zone bits contain either 'F'x, forming the characters 0–9, or the character position containing the overpunch contains a hexadecimal value indicating a ...