ASCII Hex UTF-8 Explained Simply

ASCII Hex UTF-8 Explained Simply | Generated by AI

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Let’s break them down clearly:

ASCII

Definition: ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is one of the earliest character encodings.
Range: Uses 7 bits (values 0–127).
Meaning: Each number corresponds to a character. For example:
- 65 → "A"
- 97 → "a"
- 48 → "0"
Limitation: Only covers English letters, digits, punctuation, and control codes (like newline).

Hex (Hexadecimal Representation)

Definition: Hex is not a character set by itself, but a numerical representation (base-16) of data.
Usage: Commonly used to display bytes in a compact and human-readable way.
Example:
- ASCII "A" = decimal 65 = hex 41.
- ASCII "B" = decimal 66 = hex 42.
- So the text "AB" looks like 41 42 in hex.

UTF-8

Definition: UTF-8 is a Unicode encoding standard.
Features:
- Variable length: encodes each character in 1 to 4 bytes.
- Backward compatible with ASCII: characters 0–127 are the same as ASCII (1 byte).
- Can represent all Unicode characters (letters, symbols, emojis, Chinese characters, etc.).
Examples:
- "A" → 41 (same as ASCII).
- "中" → E4 B8 AD (three bytes in hex).
- "😊" → F0 9F 98 8A (four bytes in hex).

✅ In short:

ASCII = old 7-bit code for English characters.
Hex = a way of writing numbers/bytes (base-16).
UTF-8 = modern encoding that includes ASCII but also supports every language and symbol.

Would you like me to also show you a side-by-side example of the same text ("Hello 世界😊") in ASCII (where possible), hex, and UTF-8 so you can see the difference directly?

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