Podcast
Questions and Answers
What is the primary purpose of ASCII?
What is the primary purpose of ASCII?
How many different characters can be represented using ASCII?
How many different characters can be represented using ASCII?
What is a code point in Unicode?
What is a code point in Unicode?
What is the main advantage of UTF-8?
What is the main advantage of UTF-8?
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Why was Unicode invented?
Why was Unicode invented?
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What is the relationship between UTF-8 and ASCII?
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?
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?
Why is UTF-8 the most dominant encoding for the web?
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What is the main limitation of ASCII?
What is the main limitation of ASCII?
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What is the hexadecimal representation of the character 'a' in Unicode?
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.
