Box drawing ASCII symbols

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers and other devices that use text. It encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers.

ASCII was created to standardize the representation of text in computers, communication equipment, and other devices that use text. Before ASCII, different systems used different encodings, which made interoperability and communication between devices difficult.

ASCII includes control characters (like carriage return and line feed) and printable characters (like letters, digits, and punctuation marks). It uses seven bits to represent each character, allowing for 128 unique characters.

Despite the existence of more comprehensive encoding standards like Unicode, ASCII remains the foundation of text representation in computing. Many protocols, file formats, and programming languages use ASCII or are based on its structure.

ASCII's main limitation is its small character set, which includes only 128 characters. This is insufficient for representing characters from many non-English languages, symbols, and emojis, leading to the development of extended ASCII and Unicode.