ASCII

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Contributors: Shawn Hymel
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Resources and Going Further

There are many character encoding sets available. The most popular encoding for the World Wide Web is UTF-8. As of June 2016, UTF-8 is used in 87% of all web pages.

UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII, which means the first 128 characters are the same as ASCII. UTF-8 can use 2, 3, and 4 bytes to encode characters from most modern written languages, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters.

Knowledge of basic ASCII encoding can be useful when working in serial terminals. See the Serial Terminal Basics to learn how to use some of the many serial terminal programs available.

If you are interested in downloading the ASCII table in image format, click the button below. With an image, you can print it out and hang it on your wall, put it on a coffee mug, or have it printed on a mouse pad.