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Lesson Note

ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
Most widely used code used in computers to translate text(characters, numbers and symbols) in to a
form (digital form) that can be understood by computers. It was developed by ANSI(American
Nationals Standard Institutes) ASCII-7 can represent 128 characters (all keyboard characters) using 7
bits. ASCII-8 can represent 256 characters using 8 bits. It is an extended form of ASCII-7.
A-Z ASCII is 65-90, a-z ASCII is 97-122, 0-9 ASCII is 48-57 and spacebar is 32.

ISCII
(Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange)
In 1991, the Bureau of Indian Standards adopted the ISCII. It is an 8 bit code which allows English and
Indian Scripts alphabets to be used simultaneously. Characters coded in ISCII need 8 bits for each
character. ISCII code retains all ASCII-7 characters and offers coding for Indian script also.
There are 15 officially recognized languages in India: Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Gujrati, Odia,
Bengali, Telugu, Kannada etc. Codes for them is included in ISCII.

UNICODE
UNICODE is a new universal coding standard adopted by all new platforms. It is promoted by
Unicode Consortium which is a non profit organization. Unicode provides a unique number for every
character irrespective of the platform, program and the language. It is a character coding system
designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the
diverse languages and pictorial symbols (emoji).
UNICODE is a common point in the conversion between other encoding schemes. Since it is a
superset of all encoding schemes so one encoding scheme  UNICODE  other encoding scheme.
UTF(Unicode Transformation format) was developed so that users have a standardized means of
encoding the characters with minimum amount of space.

UNICODE character set maps each character of any language in the world to a unique number.
These are platform independent and are called code points.
UTF8, UTF16, UTF32 are the standards for encoding.