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ASCII vs. UNICODE
ASCII and UNICODE are the two most extensively used character encoding schemes in computer systems. The most basic difference between ASCII and UNICODE is that ASCII is used to represent text in form of symbols, numbers, and character, whereas UNICODE is used to exchange, process, and store text data in any language.
What is ASCII?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a standard developed for character encoding in electronic communication. ASCII was first published in 1963. In computers and other electronic systems, it is used for representing text as symbols, characters, and numbers.
In ASCII, each letter is assigned a particular value between 0 and 127. Thus, ASCII can be used to represent 128 characters. Most computer systems use ASCII encoding scheme that makes the interchange of data among different devices simple.
The following table shows some of the symbols and their ASCII values.
| Name | Symbol | ASCII Value | Binary Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Null char | NUL | 0 | 00000000 |
| Start of Heading | SOH | 1 | 00000001 |
| Substitute | SUB | 26 | 00011010 |
| Escape | ESC | 27 | 00011011 |
| File Separator | FS | 28 | 00011100 |
| Group Separator | GS | 29 | 00011101 |
| Record Separator | RS | 30 | 00011110 |
| Unit Separator | US | 31 | 00011111 |
| Space | 32 | 00100000 | |
| Exclamation mark | ! | 33 | 00100001 |
| Double quotes | " | 34 | 00100010 |
| Number | # | 35 | 00100011 |
| Dollar | $ | 36 | 00100100 |
| Procenttecken | % | 37 | 00100101 |
| Ampersand | & | 38 | 00100110 |
| Single quote | ' | 39 | 00100111 |
| Left parenthesis | ( | 40 | 00101000 |
| Right parenthesis | ) | 41 | 00101001 |
| Asterisk | * | 42 | 00101010 |
| Plus | + | 43 | 00101011 |
| Comma | , | 44 | 00101100 |
| Hyphen | - | 45 | 00101101 |
| Period or Dot or Full stop | . | 46 | 00101110 |
| Slash or divide | / | 47 | 00101111 |
| Zero | 0 | 48 | 00110000 |
| One | 1 | 49 | 00110001 |
| Two | 2 | 50 | 00110010 |
| Eight | 8 | 56 | 00111000 |
| Nine | 9 | 57 | 00111001 |
| Colon | : | 58 | 00111010 |
| Semicolon | ; | 59 | 00111011 |
| Less than | < | 60 | 00111100 |
| Equals | = | 61 | 00111101 |
| Greater than | > | 62 | 00111110 |
| Question mark | ? | 63 | 00111111 |
| At symbol | @ | 64 | 01000000 |
| Uppercase A | A | 65 | 01000001 |
| Uppercase B | B | 66 | 01000010 |
| Uppercase C | C | 67 | 01000011 |
| Uppercase D | D | 68 | 01000100 |
| Uppercase X | X | 88 | 01011000 |
| Uppercase Y | Y | 89 | 01011001 |
| Uppercase Z | Z | 90 | 01011010 |
| Opening square bracket | [ | 91 | 01011011 |
| Backslash | \ | 92 | 01011100 |
| Closing square bracket | ] | 93 | 01011101 |
| Caret - circumflex | ^ | 94 | 01011110 |
| Underscore | _ | 95 | 01011111 |
| Grave accent | ` | 96 | 01100000 |
| Lowercase a | a | 97 | 01100001 |
| Lowercase b | b | 98 | 01100010 |
| Lowercase c | c | 99 | 01100011 |
| Lowercase d | d | 100 | 01100100 |
| Lowercase e | e | 101 | 01100101 |
| Lowercase v | v | 118 | 01110110 |
| Lowercase w | w | 119 | 01110111 |
| Lowercase x | x | 120 | 01111000 |
| Lowercase y | y | 121 | 01111001 |
| Lowercase z | z | 122 | 01111010 |
| Opening curly brace | { | 123 | 01111011 |
| Vertical bar (Pipe) | | | 124 | 01111100 |
| Closing curly brace | } | 125 | 01111101 |
| Equivalency sign (tilde) | ~ | 126 | 01111110 |
| Delete | 127 | 01111111 |
What is UNICODE?
UNICODE stands for Universal Character Set. UNICODE is an encoding scheme whose standards are maintained by UNICODE Consortium. The greatest advantage of UNICODE is that we can uniquely define every character in every language by giving a different number.
UNICODE represents a wide range of characters, formulae, texts, mathematical symbols, emojis, greek letters, etc. from different languages. Therefore, UNICODE is the one of the most popular encoding scheme to encode many of the globally used characters.
UNICODE encoding schemes are classified into several types depending on the number of bits used. These UNICODE encoding schemes are UTF-7 (7-bit encoding scheme), UTF-8 (8-bit encoding scheme), UTF-16 (16-bit encoding scheme), and UTF-32 (32-bit encoding scheme). Here, UTF stands for UNICODE Transformation Format, which is a type of UNICODE encoding scheme.
The main objective of the use of UNICODE is localization and internationalization of computer applications and software. UNICODE is also used for programming of operating systems, java applications, XML, etc.
Difference Between ASCII and UNICODE
The following highlights all the important differences between ASCII and UNICODE −
| Parameter | ASCII | UNICODE |
|---|---|---|
| Full form | ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. | UNICODE stands for Universal Character Set. |
| Mutual Relationship | ASCII is a subset of UNICODE encoding scheme. | UNICODE is a superset of ASCII. |
| Supporting Characters | ASCII supports only 128 characters using 7-bit encoding scheme. It contains codes representing English characters, digits, and standard special symbols. | UNICODE supports a wide range of characters. It supports 154 written scripts. |
| Bits Per Character | ASCII uses 7-bit or 8-bits (Extended ASCII) to represent different characters. | UNICODE uses mainly four character encoding schemes namely UTF-7 (7-bit), UTF-8 (8-bit), UTF-16 (16-bit), and UTF-32 (32-bit). |
| Memory Consumption | ASCII consumes less memory. | UNICODE consumes more memory as compared to ASCII. |
| Characters Represented | ASCII can represent only English letters, digits, certain mathematical symbols, and some grammatical symbols, etc. | UNICODE can represent a large range characters, special symbols, formulae, etc. from different languages such as English, Latin, Greek, etc. |
| First Edition Release | The first edition of ASCII was released in 1963. | The first edition of UNICODE was released in 1991. |
| Applications | ASCII encoding scheme is used in computers and other electronic devices for exchange of data. It is also used in programming languages like HTML. | UNICODE is used by IT industries for encoding and character representation in computers. |
Conclusion
Both ASCII and UNICODE are the character encoding schemes used in electronic communication. From the above comparison of ASCII and UNICODE, we can state the most significant difference between them that is, ASCII is a basic encoding scheme that represents 128 characters in 7-bit encoding, whereas UNICODE is a vast ocean of text, numbers, mathematical symbols, emojis, formulae, etc. that can be mapped in different bit sizes. However, ASCII is a proper subset of UNICODE, hence UNICODE can represent all the characters in ASCII.
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