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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a commonly used character set. It uses 7-bits per symbol and includes the English alphabet in upper and lower case, digits, punctuation, and a variety of control codes such as line separators, tabulators and erase characters. Accented characters and most special symbols such as � and � are not supported.
ASCII today is typically stored in octets, with the most significant bit unused, as described in RFC 20.
Most modern character sets uses ASCII as the first 128 entries for compatibility, including all ISO 8859 sets and Unicode.
Non-ASCII compatible character sets include EBCDIC.
See also
This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.
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