10 Notable Differences Between Unicode and ASCII in 2021
Difference Between Unicode and ASCII: Unicode and ASCII both are standards for encoding texts used around the world. These codes provide a unique number for every symbol no matter which language or program is being used.
The way characters and numbers encoded using ASCII and Unicode are a bit different. Unicode and ASCII are standards on how to represent different characters in binary so that they can be written, stored, transmitted, and read in digital media.
Unicode and ASCII
ASCII is abbreviated from American Standard Code For Information Interchange. It is a character which is used for encoding standard for communication through electronics.
One of the main reasons why Unicode was the problem arose from the many non-standard extended ASCII programs. Unless you are using the prevalent page, which is used by Microsoft and most other software companies, then you are likely to encounter problems with your characters appearing as boxes.
What is ASCII?
Any electronic communication device reads data as electric pulses, as on and off. This on and off is represented in digital terms as 1 and 0 respectively.
Representation of data in terms of 1’s and 0’s is called binary representation. Anything you type on a computer is stored in the form of these two numbers only.
In the early years of computing, the only language known to computer programmers was English (since computers and everything related to it was invented in the USA).
Hence, for computer encoders, a total of 127-128 characters were more than enough to represent everything that was there on the keyboard.
Computer encoders developed ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Exchange, an encoding standard. This standard was used to encode a certain number of characters, 127 to be exact.
These 127 characters included: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, punctuation marks, newline characters, and so on.
What is Unicode?
The short form of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange is ASCII. Encoding of that system is based on ordering the English alphabet. All modern data encoding machines support ASCII as well as others. ASCII was first used by Bell data services as a seven-bit Tele-printer.
The use of binary systems had brought tremendous change in our personal computing. Personal Computer as we see now is the boon of using binary language which was used as core things for encoding and decoding. Various languages later created and adopted are based on it.
As the binary system makes the PC more comfortable and user-friendly for all, similarly ASCII is being used for making easiness in communicating. 33 characters are non-printing, 94 printing characters, and space altogether makes 128 characters which are used by ASCII.
Notable Distinctions Between Unicode and ASCII
1. ASCII is an American Coding system while on the other hand Unicode is an international coding system for computers and other electronic devices.
2. American Standard Code For Information Interchange uses an 8-bit encoding while Unicode uses a variable bit encoding.
3. Unicode is standardized while ASCII isn’t.
4. Unicode represents most written languages in the world while ASCII does not.
5. American Standard Code For Information Interchange has its equivalent within Unicode.
6. ASCII usually represents lowercase letters and uppercase letters, digits, and symbols while on the other hand, Unicode represents all letters of Arabic, English, and other languages.
7. ASCII represents a small range of numbers and characters while on other hand, Unicode represents Mathematical symbols, scripts, emoji, and a wide range of characters while comparing to ASCII.
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