ASCII, American Code for Information Interchange. Character Symbols.

(Pronounced "ass-kee." or "ask-key.")

American Code for Information Interchange - Pronounced "ass-kee." or "ask-key". A way of represent characters. The first 128 characters are standardized, and the first 32 of those are control codes, which are not visible characters but codes that can be used for text formatting or actions, such as form-feed. After the 32 control codes, the next 96 standardized characters represent numbers, letters (both uppercase and lowercase), and standard punctuation marks. The last 128 characters represent different things on different platforms. The total number of characters is 256, (8 bits of binary data). Only the first 7 bits 0 to 127 are defined. (The 8th bit may have been used as a parity check, generally this eight bit is now used to store extra characters).

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ASCII Character Codes. This is a list of character codes in decimal, hex, octal and binary.

ASCII Code Characters  Includes (ASCII Control code details and The IBM (DOS) Extended Character set)

A tutorial on character code issues

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Please note there could be errors below. Also there are different numbering systems. If you spot any errors please click here and let me know the exact error.

Note * : this creates a non-breaking space.  You can indent stuff off the margin with a few  .

Note  .is useful if you don't want words to be placed onto a new lines you may separate them with   This is especially useful for names etc.. Firstname Surname may be cause the Surname to be paced on different lines whereas Firstname Surname should keep these two together, the two word may be placed on a new line but they will be kept together.

Example space used:- Firstname Surname Fred Jones

Example non-breaking space, (   ), used:- Firstname Surname Fred Jones

Note : when there is no named value for a symbol, you can use its numerical value instead. All characters have a number attached to them, but if there is a name, you may as well use that.

Caution : If you are putting in the code correctly but the symbol isn't coming up you may want to check which font the text is in. Some typefaces won't have the symbol included. You can fix this by changing all your text's font type, or by wrapping the FONT tag (with a common font like Arial) around the symbol itself.

ASCII instead of EBCDIC, Rad50, or Unicode, discrepancies arise. (From O'reilly PERL cookbook)

Unicode  provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

Unicode HTML Entities From Mr. Rat

Unicode Easy Keyboard Layout This is a keyboard layout for Windows XP that adds easy access for lots of additional characters. It differs from the "United States International" keyboard layout included with Windows in that none of the standard punctuation marks are dead keys. This means you can activate this layout and not even notice it until you intentionally use it, whereas using the "United States International" layout requires retraining yourself in typing certain character combinations. Also, the Unicode Easy keyboard layout includes all of the Latin composite characters and all of the Greek characters in Unicode, whereas the built-in layout includes only characters in the ISO-8859-1 code page. Supported diacritical marks are: acute, grave, circumflex, diaeresis, tilde, cedilla, breve, caron, ring above, stroke, macron, dot above, and dot below.

Under Unix or Plan9, a "\n", (Newline character), represents the physical sequence "\cJ" (the PERL double-quote escape for Ctrl-J), a linefeed. An Enter key generates an incoming "\cM" (a carriage return) which turns into "\cJ", whereas an outgoing "\cJ" turns into "\cM\cJ", (carriage return and a linefeed) .

Apple Mac, a "\n" is usually represented by "\cM" because the standard requires that "\n" and "\r" be different a "\r" represents a "\cJ". This is the opposite of the way that Unix, Plan9, VMS, CP/M, or nearly anyone else does it. So, Mac programmers writing files for other systems or talking over a network have to be careful. If you send out "\n", you'll deliver a "\cM", and no "\cJ" will be seen. Most network services prefer to receive and send "\cM\cJ" as a line terminator, but most accept merely a "\cJ".

With VMS, DOS, or their derivatives, a "\n" represents "\cJ", similar to Unix  and Plan9. From the perspective of a tty, Unix and DOS act identically a user who hits Enter generates a "\cM", which arrives at the program as a "\n", which is "\cJ". A "\n" ("\cJ", remember) sent to a terminal shows up as a "\cM\cJ".

This occurs with Windows files as well. A DOS text file actually physically contains two characters at the end of every line, "\cM\cJ". The last block in the file has a "\cZ" to indicate where the EOF, End of File). When you write a line like "This is a line\n" on those systems, the file contains "This is a line\cM\cJ", just as if it were a terminal.

If you read a line on such systems. The file itself contains "This is a line\cM\cJ", this is a 16-byte string. When it is read by you program it gets "This is a line\n", where that "\n" is the virtual newline character, that is, a linefeed ( "\cJ" ). To remove it, a single chop or chomp, in PERL will do.

Be careful with the position markers in such files. The way the file is stored may have a different way to how it is displayed and how the data is interpreted by the program. This could lead to miscalculations of the position.

Use the tell function, in PERL (Returns the current position for FILEHANDLE, or -1 on error. FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the actual filehandle. If FILEHANDLE is omitted, assumes the file last read.), to determine your location.

This legacy of the old CP/M filesystem, whose equivalent of a Unix  inode stored only block counts and not file sizes, has frustrated programmers for decades, and no end is in sight. DOS is compatible with CP/M file formats, Windows with DOS, and NT with Windows.

On Windows, text and binary files are quite different. In a text file, the characters'\r\n'are translated to'\n'when read from the disk. The End Of File marker, (EOF), is the'^Z'character. If you open a file in text mode, and the data has a'^Z'somewhere in it, the file may abort prematurely. In binary files, these characters are not translated, they're treated like an ordinary character value.

Character Entity References in HTML and XHTML. A set of tables allowed entities in HTML and XHTML, as described in section 24 of the official HTML specifications, published by the W3C. Divided into logical, categories. From Cookwood Press.

OPERATOR DIFFERENCES The .. range operator treats certain character ranges with care on EBCDIC machines. For example the following array will have twenty six elements on either an EBCDIC machine or an ASCII machine. Find out about cJ, cI, (You may see these when loading Excel characters codes via PERL), etc...

Unicode (UTF-8) provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

UTF-8 and Unicode Standards. What is UTF-8? UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format-8. It is an octet,( see Octal). (8-bit) lossless encoding of Unicode characters.

Hexadecimal Values

The hexadecimal system (hex for short) uses numbers from 0 to 15. It starts off like the decimal system: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 but then comes A which equals 10 and then B, C, D, E and F (which of course equals 15). The next number is 10 which is actually 16 in decimal and so on....

Because it can be impossible to distinguish between a hex and a decimal number (is that 25 a decimal 25 or is it 25 in hex which equals 37 decimal?) it is custom to put a lower case h after each hex number.

Octal Values

Similar to the hexadecimal system but uses a base of 8. It therefore includes only the digits 0 through 7 (any other digit would make the number an invalid octal number).

Binary Values

Most computers use switches, (transistors very small,) which have two states (or "on" and "off" or "false" and "true")  0 or 1.

So will be something like 01000100. Not all the bits may be shown e.g. 101 is the same as 00000101 which is 5 decimal.

Microsoft Global Input Method Editors (IMEs). Now, you can input Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text into any Microsoft Office XP applications, Web forms, and e-mail messages on any language version of Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 (SP6) or later. And it's easy. After you have installed the Global IME for Office XP, you just start your Office XP program, select the language from the Language bar, and you can type the language you choose, regardless of the language version of Office XP or Windows you are using. Translation 

ECMA Standards. ECMA International is an industry association founded in 1961, dedicated to the standardization of information and communication systems.

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