American Standard Code for Information Interchange

ASCII

The standard adopted by ANSI for compatible data transfer between data systems and associated equipment. The 8-bit character code consists of 7 bits with the 8th bit for parity check.

The ASCII character set consists of 128 characters. These characters are the same as the first 128 characters of the ANSI character set. The extended ASCII character set consists of a second set of 128 characters, whose elements vary with different computer manufacturers and with different languages.