Questions and Answers
What is the primary purpose of ASCII?
How many different characters can be represented using ASCII?
What is a code point in Unicode?
What is the main advantage of UTF-8?
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Why was Unicode invented?
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What is the relationship between UTF-8 and ASCII?
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What is the maximum number of bytes required to represent a character in UTF-8?
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Why is UTF-8 the most dominant encoding for the web?
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What is the main limitation of ASCII?
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What is the hexadecimal representation of the character 'a' in Unicode?
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Study Notes
ASCII
- Maps bits (zeros and ones) into characters, necessary because computers store data as zeros and ones
- Uses 7 bits for encoding, allowing for 2^7 (128) different characters to be represented
- Example: 65 represents 'A', 116 represents 'T', and case matters
- Original 7 bits were only enough to represent English characters, punctuation, and some codes
- Drawbacks: limited character representation, competition for additional characters with the 8th bit
Unicode
- A universal character encoding that supports many different alphabets and even emojis
- Specifies which character refers to which code point (hexadecimal number), but doesn't define how mapping should be implemented
- Code point example: U+0001 represents 'a' and is equal to 65 in decimal
UTF-8
- Stands for Unicode Transformation Format, an algorithmic mapping from every Unicode code point to a unique byte sequence
- Variable length encoding, meaning characters with small code point values can be represented with one byte, and those with large values can be represented with up to four bytes
- Backwards compatible with ASCII, meaning any ASCII file can also be read with UTF-8
- Most dominant encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for roughly 98% of all web pages
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Description
Learn the fundamentals of ASCII, Unicode, and UTF-8 encoding schemes, including how computers store and represent characters using bits and bytes.