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ASCII vs UNICODE – Difference Between Both
Here’s a great article from The Crazy Programmer
Unicode and ASCII are now the two-character encoding systems that are most extensively used worldwide. We can process, share and store text in any language through unicode encoding, as opposed to ASCII, which is used to represent text in computers as symbols, characters, and numbers.
What is ASCII?
American Standard Code for Information Interchange is referred to as ASCII. It represents text with numbers. Characters include digits (1, 2, 3, etc.), letters (a, b, c, etc.), and symbols (!). Each character in a text message is changed into a number using ASCII. This collection of figures is simpler to keep in the computer’s memory. If I explain it in laymen’s words then it is the process of giving a character a numerical value.
Let us take an example, an upper case character ‘A’ is assigned as 65, lower case character ‘a’ is assigned as 97. Here’s an image of the ASCII table explaining all the values assigned to the character.
What is Unicode?
Just like ASCII, Unicode also provides one of the ways to uniquely defined numbers. The Unicode encoding method maintains the Unicode standard, which defines emoji and more than 1 lakh 40 thousand characters through 150 modern and ancient scripts.
There are different ways of encoding that can be done through Unicode like UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. According to statistics, UTF-8 is the most popular encoding used on the World Wide Web.
Differences between ASCII and Unicode
Here’s a table containing some main differences between both.
| Unicode | ASCII |
| Unicode has the ability to encrypt 154 scripts. | An Ascii has the ability to convert only 128 characters with the 7-bit range. |
| Unicode is a bigger version of Ascii. | Ascii is a smaller version of Unicode. |
| It represents Universal Character Set. | It represents American Standard Code for Information Interchange. |
| It can use 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit as compared to the encoding style. | It can use 7 bits to represent a character. |
| It needs more space. | It needs less space. |
| An encoding standard is used for electronic communication. | A standard way for encoding and managing the text. |
Conclusion
In conclusion, the text encoding standards Unicode and ASCII are of the highest importance in recent communication methods. By now you must have understood that Unicode and Ascii contain their own advantages, it depends on the programmer to use encoding systems as per needs. Feel free to comment below if you are still having any doubts.
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