ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communicatons equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings have a historical basis in ASCII.
ASCII was first published as a standard in 1967 and was last updated in 1986. It currently defines codes for 33 non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed, plus the following 95 printable characters (starting with the space character):
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
|