ASCII stands for (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), it is basically a standard that contains all the characters with assigned codes. All computers use this format to share files with other computers on different devices and networks.
ASCII also includes control characters, which are used to alter the appearance of text. There are a total of 128 characters starting from 0-127. Each character, letter or number occupies eight bits which is one bit less than a byte.
All the software or applications we use that deal with text are using ASCII numbers. All the files including documents or source codes that is used for programming are stored as the ASCII text. Computers can only process numbers (0,1) as input, andASCII is the numerical representation of these characters that computer systems can understand.
ASCII files can be transferred without any special commands, but binary files require special commands. In the past, the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) required setting a command known as SET BINARY to transfer binary files. But, the currently used file transfer protocol transfers both the data (ASCII & Binary) in the exact and correct manner automatically.
The extended ASCII is still not supported by all networking channels. However, ASCII is essential as it is used to represent any data that is in the text format and any computer can display it without any additional requirement.
