ASCII files, short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange files, refer to text files that store data using the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding system. ASCII is a widely used character encoding that represents computer text in a standardized format. It assigns unique numeric codes to different characters, such as letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and control characters.
ASCII files consist of plain text that can be easily read and edited by both humans and machines. They have a simple structure, with each character in the file represented by a specific ASCII code. The ASCII codes range from 0 to 127, with each code corresponding to a particular character. For example, the ASCII code 65 represents the uppercase letter "A," while the code 48 represents the digit "0."
These files are widely used in various computing applications, such as text editors, programming, and data exchange between different systems. Since ASCII files are stored as plain text, they can be easily transferred between different operating systems without losing their content or format. ASCII files are typically small in size as they only require 8 bits per character.
While ASCII files are compatible across different platforms, they have certain limitations compared to other file formats. As they can only represent a limited set of characters, they might not be suitable for storing textual data that requires specialized characters, international characters, or non-textual data such as images or multimedia.
