Ascii vs Unicode

The two-character encoding schemes that are currently most widely utilized around the world are Unicode and ASCII. As opposed to ASCII, which is used to represent text in computers as symbols, characters, and numbers, Unicode is a character encoding that may be used to process, store, and exchange text data in any language.

What is ASCII?

  • For electronic communication, it is a standard for character encoding. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was first published in 1963. ASCII codes are used to represent text in computers and other electronic devices.
  • Each letter is given a distinct value between 0 and 127 in the ASCII code, which is used to represent 128 English characters. For instance, uppercase A has the ASCII value 65, uppercase B has the code 66, and so on. For other examples, see the table below.
  • The majority of computers encode text using ASCII encoding, which makes moving data between devices much simpler.

For Example:

NameSymbol / CharASCII ValueHexadecimal Code
Dollar$3624
The ampersand&3826
Asterisk*422A
Minus Sign / Hyphen-452D
Decimal Point.462E

What is UNICODE?

  • Every character in every language spoken today can be defined uniquely thanks to Unicode by being given a different number. The Unicode Consortium maintains the Unicode standard, which includes emojis and more than 1,40,000 characters from more than 150 present and historical scripts.
  • Different character encodings, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, can be used to define Unicode. Over 90% of websites on the World Wide Web and the majority of contemporary operating systems, including Windows, employ UTF-8, making it the most widely used of them.

ASCII VS UNICODE

Let us now see some of the main differences between ASCII and UNICODE:

UNICODEASCII
A wider range of characters than ASCII is represented by Unicode, including letters from languages like English, Arabic, Greek, and others, mathematical symbols, historical scripts, and emoji.Lowercase letters (a-z), uppercase letters (A-Z), numerals (0-9), and symbols like parenthesis, dollars, the ampersand, and others are represented by the ASCII code.
Unicode encrypts 154 written scripts.Only 128 different characters can be encoded using ASCII using a 7-bit range.
UNICODE is a superset of ASCII.ASCII is a proper subset of UNICODE

We can conclude that the text encoding systems, Unicode and ASCII, are of the highest importance in contemporary communications. Both have advantages and downsides, but a more universal encoding technique will always make communication easier in the long run.