ASCII

ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". The ASCII character set was designed for English and other languages which use a Roman alphabet.

C was designed to work with ASCII and we will only use ASCII in this course. ASCII can represent 128 characters and is encoded in one eight bit byte with a leading 0. Seven bits can encode numbers 0 to 127. Since integers in the range of 0 to 127 can be stored in 1 byte of space, the sizeof(char) is 1.

The characters 0 through 31 represent control characters (e.g., line feed, back space), 32-126 are printable characters, and 127 is delete

We really would like to think of characters as letters, digits, punctuation marks, etc., and not as numbers. Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful that the letter A (Ascii 65) is followed by the letter B (Ascii 66), and that adding 32 to the code for an uppercase letter yields the code for its lower case equivalent.

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