What is ASCII?

ASCII

The video explains ASCII, pronounced “aski,” which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII represents text as numbers: each letter, digit, or symbol—collectively called a character—is assigned a numerical value. This lets computers store text as numbers.

Examples include:

• Uppercase A is represented by 65.
• The exclamation mark (!) is represented by 33.

ASCII defines 128 characters, which can be looked up in an ASCII table. It is also a subset of Unicode, so ASCII characters are included within Unicode.

Uses of ASCII

The video describes several uses for ASCII:

• It is used in email and in computer science, including programming, text files, and data conversion.
• Programmers can use character values in calculations. For example, lowercase a is 97 and uppercase A is 65, so their difference is 32. That difference can be used to convert between uppercase and lowercase letters.
• In binary, the case conversion corresponds to changing the bit associated with the value 32.
• ASCII characters can be arranged to create text-based graphic art.

Speaker

• BitMerge narrator — the only speaker identified in the subtitles.