Characters Reference

ASCII

The American Standards Association (ASA), which later changed its name to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), created the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) in response to the need for a standard character code for interchanging data between systems. It decided that a 7-bit code (128 characters) would be sufficient for ASCII; 32 non-printable control characters, and 96 printing characters covering the full set of an English-language typewriter.

ACK	Acknowledge	EM	End of medium	NUL	Null
BEL	Bell	ENQ	Enquiry	RS	Record separator
BS	Backspace	EOT	End of transmission	SI	Shift in
CAN	Cancel	ESC	Escape	SO	Shift out
CR	Carriage return	ETB	End of transmission block	SOH	Start of header
DC1	Data control 1	ETX	End of text	STX	Start of text
DC2	Data control 2	FF	NP form feed, new page	SUB	Substitute
DC3	Data control 3	FS	File separator	SYN	Synchronous idle
DC4	Data control 4	GS	Group separator	TAB	Horizontal tabulation
DEL	Delete	LF	NL Line feed, new line	US	Unit separator
DLE	Data link escape	NAK	Negative acknowledge	VT	Vertical tab

Extended ASCII

The extended ASCII, a superset of ASCII, uses 8-bit to encode the characters. The extra bit gives an additional of 128 characters (shown in table 2 below) to the original ASCII. It allows text-based programs to draw boxes and mathematical symbols

Table 2 - Extended ASCII codes.

ISO Latin-1

The ISO 8859-1, also known as Latin-1, is a standard character set developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It extends ASCII to include Latin-languages letters. Latin-1 is one of the set of character entity references supported by HTML. This means that non-ASCII latin-based scripts may be represented on a web page by ISO Latin-1 codes. The first 128 Latin-1 characters being the same as ASCII, table 3 below shows the "upper" 128 characters.