Ascii character how many bits

Eight bits are called a byte. One byte character sets can contain characters. The current standard, though, is Unicode which uses two bytes to represent all characters in all writing systems in the world in a single set.

This was used in teletype machines. The eighth bit was originally used to check parity - a way to look for errors. IBM and Mac both created extended character sets for their personal computers, using the eighth bit to double the number of characters.

As competitors, they didn't use the same characters in the same positions in their sets. Thus 8-bit character sets and incompatibility were born. Today's standards have reduced such problems. On the Internet, many cables had wires that were designed to transmit 7-bit codes.

So on disk, the numbers for the file look like this:. The first 32 values 0 through 31 are codes for things like carriage return and line feed. The space character is the 33rd value, followed by punctuation, digits, uppercase characters and lowercase characters. To see all values, check out Unicode.

Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. A Unicode character in UTF encoding is between 16 2 bytes and 32 bits 4 bytes , though most of the common characters take 16 bits. This is the encoding used by Windows internally.

Unicode character can be 2 or 4 bytes, so that would be 16 or 32 bits, whereas Windows sometimes incorrectly called ANSI is only 1 bytes so 8 bits. In Asian version of Windows and some others, the entire system runs in double-byte, so a character is 16 bits. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How many bits or bytes are there in a character? Asked 10 years, 9 months ago. Active 2 years, 11 months ago. Viewed k times. Louis Yang 2, 1 1 gold badge 18 18 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges. RedKing RedKing 1, 4 4 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Your question and title ask for different things. Anyway, I don't understand you, can you explain further?

Yes, I wasn't sure about that either.