ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." It is a character encoding standard used in computing to represent text characters as numerical values. In ASCII, each character is assigned a unique numeric code ranging from 0 to 127, which corresponds to letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters.

The ASCII standard was developed in the 1960s to ensure compatibility and consistency in data communication between different computer systems and devices. It includes basic Latin alphabet characters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters such as newline (LF), carriage return (CR), and tab (TAB).

For example, the ASCII code for the uppercase letter "A" is 65, lowercase "a" is 97, digit "0" is 48, space is 32, and so on. These codes are used internally by computers to represent and process text data.

While ASCII is widely used, it has limitations, particularly for languages with characters not included in the standard. Extended character sets like ISO-8859 and Unicode were later developed to support a broader range of characters and symbols from different languages and writing systems. However, ASCII remains fundamental in many computing contexts, especially for representing basic text data.

The ASCII table can indeed be divided into three main sections:

1. **Control Characters**: These are the first 32 characters in the ASCII table, represented by values 0 to 31. Control characters are non-printable characters used to control devices such as printers and terminals. They include characters such as carriage return (CR), line feed (LF), tab (TAB), and escape (ESC). 2. **Printable Characters**: The next section of the ASCII table consists of printable characters, ranging from character 32 to character 127. These characters include basic Latin letters (both uppercase and lowercase), digits, punctuation marks, and special symbols such as the dollar sign ($) and percent sign (%). 3. **Extended ASCII Characters**: Some ASCII variants, known as extended ASCII, include characters beyond the standard 7-bit ASCII range (0 to 127). These extended characters typically range from character 128 to character 255. They include additional symbols, accented letters, and characters from various languages. These three sections together cover the entire ASCII character set, providing a standardized way to represent text characters in computing systems.


Here is an ASCII code chart showing the standard ASCII characters:



Here's a basic overview of some of the extended ASCII characters and their corresponding codes: