Alphanumeric Codes in Digital Electronics: ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode. Alphanumerical characters, on keyboard for example, are required to be represented in binary form. For this purpose 7 or 8 bit binary codes are used to indicate different characters.
Alphanumeric Codes
Digital systems and computers process information in digital (binary) form. Hence, alphanumerical characters, on keyboard for example, are required to be represented in binary form. For this purpose 7 or 8 bit binary codes are used to indicate different characters. Each of these 7 or 8 bit code is generally represented by its equivalent hexadecimal number.
ASCII- American Standard Code for Information Interchange
It is 7-bit binary code generally used for representing characters on a key board. In Table below we can see ASCII codes representing some of the keyboard characters.
EBCDIC- Extended BCD Interchange Code
It is an 8-bit (byte) binary code used for the same purpose as ASCII. EBCDIC is used mainly by IBM mainframes and compatibles. Each single byte EBCDIC is divided into two parts. The first four bits are called the zone and represent the category of the character, whereas the last four bits are the called the digit and identify the specific character.
Unicode- Universal Code
Unicode stands for universal code. It is developed to accommodate all the languages and symbols used in the world. It is a 16-bit code capable of representing 65536 characters which is more than enough for this purpose. It eliminates the complexity of multibyte character sets that are currently used on UNIX and Windows to support Asian languages.
Unicode was created by a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, HP, Digital and IBM and merged its efforts with the ISO-10646 standard to produce a single standard in 1993. Unicode is already the basis for latest operating systems like Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Vista etc and application packages like MS Office 2007.
The following table gives the representation of key board characters in these three codes.
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