Definition of American Standard Code for Information Interchange

A standard single-byte character encoding scheme used for text-based data. ASCII uses designated 7-bit or 8-bit number combinations to represent either 128 or 256 possible characters. Standard ASCII uses 7 bits to represent all uppercase and lowercase letters, the numbers 0 through 9, punctuation marks, and special control characters used in U.S. English. Most current x86based systems support the use of extended (or high’) ASCII. Extended ASCII allows the eighth bit of each character to identify an additional 128 special symbol characters