ASCII

n. (abbr. of American Standard Code for Information Interchange) a standard, seven-bit character set for use by digital computers, which includes 96 displaying symbols (letters, digits, punctuation) and 32 control codes (line feed, newline, tab, etc.)

Notes

ASCII and its extensions are the most prevalent character set in computing. Standard ASCII, sometimes called flat ASCII, uses seven bits per byte, allowing for a total of 128 characters. The formal standard specification for ASCII can be found in ANSI X3.4 and ISO 646. Extended ASCII uses eight bits and can represent 256 characters. International, eight-bit extensions have been published in the ISO 8859 series.