#ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
- ASCII is an older character encoding standard that uses 7 bits to represent 128 different characters.
- It’s limited to the basic Latin alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and control characters.
- ASCII is not suitable for encoding characters from non-Latin scripts.
#UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format-8)
- UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding capable of representing all Unicode characters.
- It’s backward-compatible with ASCII, meaning the first 128 characters in UTF-8 are the same as in ASCII.
- UTF-8 is widely used for web content, data exchange, and storage as it supports a wide range of languages.
#UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format-16)
- UTF-16 is another encoding for Unicode characters, using 16 bits per character.
- It can represent a broader range of characters compared to UTF-8.
- UTF-16 is commonly used in systems that require extensive character support but results in larger file sizes due to the use of 16 bits per character.
#Difference between encoding and its impact
| Encoding | Character Range | File Size | Compatibility | Human-Readability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASCII | Limited to the basic Latin characters | Smaller file sizes | Limited to basic characters, not suitable for multilingual content. | Simplest to read bc limited character set |
| UTF-8 | Supports a much broader range of characters, including non-Latin scripts, symbols, and emojis. | Larger file sizes | Compatibility with ASCII and broad support for different languages. | Can be human-readable |
Data Formats