What Is Ascii Table Extended

By Petra Berg


Character encodings with 8 or more bits that incorporate all of the standard characters coming from the 7-bit code as well as many more are referred to as Ascii table extended. Natural languages from over the world contain a large number of different symbols. The code, however, has limitations and this makes it impossible to represent most of those symbols.

All these extensions help the handling of symbols that are present in these languages. Computers started being made in all kinds of different countries long before a standard could be set for all of them to follow. Therefore, a lot of code extensions appeared, but they were all proprietary and incompatible.

In the beginning, there was only the Ascii with 7 bits. The problem was that almost all of the computers work with data structured in bytes containing 8 bits. This is why a large number of extensions actually rely on the leftover 128 characters when you facilitate all the bits of every byte. This made possible the inclusion of a large number of languages.

However, not all the languages that were spoken in every country using computers could be included. Therefore, there appeared a lot of variations of those 8-bit codes. The first set of codes to be widely accepted was put into use by Microsoft with the famous MS-DOS operating system.

With this extension, the original values were kept by the lower128 characters while a set of pages was created and each one could be made available to be used with the upper 128 characters. In the US, page 437 was used to include accented characters and enable writing in German or French.

All the symbols which become available through the Ascii table extended enable you to write in a lot of languages in one document. This benefit is of great importance since it eases the creation of computers all around the globe and the communication between all kinds of people. ascii table extended




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