ASCII vs. UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 vs. UTF-32

ASCII vs. UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 vs. UTF-32(benbrougher.tech)

4 points by moutansos 3 years ago | 4 comments

tsukikage 3 years ago |

"IBM z/OS on mainframes used a character set called EBCDI"

"Each ASCII character is 8 bits wide, or one byte. The result of this means that if each bit is either a 1 or a 0 that there are only 128 possible combinations"

"it uses two chunks of 2 bytes, instead of 4-byte chunks in UTF-8"

chaimanmeow 3 years ago |

does ascii have one of the bits reserved for parity check? This part confuses me:

"Each ASCII character is 8 bits wide, or one byte. The result of this means that if each bit is either a 1 or a 0 that there are only 128 possible combinations of ASCII characters."

If all 8 bits are used for data there should be 255 possible combinations.

beardyw 3 years ago | |

I thought ASCII only used 7 bits for the basic set, which would be 128. The remaining 128 seems to be used for special or language specific characters, but varies somehow.

mikecoles 3 years ago | | |

I'm uncertain, but you may be remembering 'code pages'.

From the site below, you can click different code pages to see the changes in extended ascii.

https://www.ascii-codes.com/