|
 |
|
|
Character Sets and Reading character data.
In Java and other high level languages, each character on the keyboard (the character set) can be represented as a binary number. Each of these characters can be stored on the computer as a char data type value. And each one of these char data type values is associated with an integer. Computer scientists in the 1900s decided that this character set of characters from the keyboard could be listed in a certain order. The order is determined by the integers which they assigned to the characters. This sequence of the characters which is a sequence of integers, is called the collating sequence. The sequence most commonly used in computing in the United States is the ASCII Character Set or what we refer to as the ASCII Code.
Java actually uses Unicode which is a larger version of the ASCII code that includes 65,536 characters. This allows many other languages world wide, in addition to English, to be included. Therefore Unicode is an International standard.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Here is the ASCII code table:
