Definition

Noun: A single, specific symbol, letter, digit, or control code that is represented and defined by a unique numerical value (a code point) in the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding standard. Each ASCII character corresponds to a 7-bit binary number.

Usage

The term "ASCII character" is used to refer to any individual element within the ASCII character set, which includes 128 standard characters. - It specifies that a character is part of the foundational, limited set used in early computing and simple text communication. - It is often used in computing contexts to discuss text encoding, data transmission, or the limitations of a system that only supports ASCII.

Examples

• Basic Usage:
  • The password field only accepts alphanumeric ASCII characters.
  • A newline is represented by a specific ASCII character.
• Technical Context:
  • The file is saved in plain text, containing only ASCII characters.
  • Each ASCII character, such as 'A' or '7', has a decimal value between 0 and 127.

Advanced Usage

• Extended ASCII: While standard ASCII is 7-bit, the term is sometimes used loosely in reference to 8-bit extensions (like ISO-8859-1) that include additional characters, though technically these are not part of the original ASCII standard.
• ASCII Art: The creative use of ASCII characters to create visual images.
  • He created a detailed portrait using only ASCII characters.

Variants and Related Words

• ASCII (noun/acronym): The encoding standard itself.
  • The document is encoded in ASCII.
• Character (noun): A more general term for any symbol, of which an ASCII character is one specific type.
  • The Unicode standard supports millions of characters beyond ASCII.
• Code Point (noun): The numerical value that represents a character in a given encoding standard.
  • The ASCII character 'a' has the code point 97.

Synonyms

• Text character (when referring to non-control, printable symbols within the ASCII set).
• Alphanumeric symbol (when specifically referring to letters A-Z, a-z, and digits 0-9 within ASCII).

Related Phrases

• Non-ASCII character: A character not included in the standard 128-character ASCII set, such as 'é', '£', or 'α'.
  • The software crashed when it encountered a non-ASCII character in the input.
• ASCII value: The numerical code point (often in decimal or hexadecimal) for an ASCII character.
  • The ASCII value for a space is 32.

Noun

1. any member of the standard code for representing characters by binary numbers