Ascii codes of Russian letters. ASCII encoding (American standard code for information interchange) - basic text encoding for the Latin alphabet

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In this article: Insert an ASCII or Unicode character into a document

If you only need to enter a few special characters or symbols, you can use keyboard shortcuts. For a list of ASCII characters, see the following tables or the article Inserting National Alphabets Using Keyboard Shortcuts.

Notes:

Inserting ASCII characters

To insert an ASCII character, press and hold the ALT key while entering the character code. For example, to insert a degree symbol (º), press and hold the ALT key, then enter 0176 on the numeric keypad.

To enter numbers, use the numeric keypad rather than the numbers on the main keyboard. If you need to enter numbers on the numeric keypad, make sure the NUM LOCK indicator is on.

Inserting Unicode Characters

To insert a Unicode character, enter the character code, then press ALT and X. For example, to insert a dollar symbol ($), enter 0024 and press ALT and X. For all Unicode character codes, see .

Important: Some Microsoft Office programs, such as PowerPoint and InfoPath, do not support converting Unicode codes to characters. If you need to insert a Unicode character in one of these programs, use .

Notes:

    If the wrong Unicode character appears after you press ALT+X, select the correct code, and then press ALT+X again.

    In addition, you must enter "U+" before the code. For example, if you enter "1U+B5" and press ALT+X, the text "1µ" will be displayed, and if you enter "1B5" and press ALT+X, the symbol "Ƶ" will be displayed.

Using the symbol table

A character table is a program built into Microsoft Windows that allows you to view the characters available for a selected font.

Using a symbol table, you can copy individual symbols or a group of symbols to the clipboard and paste them into any program that supports displaying those symbols. Opening the symbol table

    In Windows 10, enter the word "symbol" in the search box on the taskbar and select the symbol table from the search results.

    In Windows 8, type "symbol" on the Start screen and select the symbol table from the search results.

    In Windows 7, click the Start button, select All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then click Character Map.

Characters are grouped by font. Click the font list to select the appropriate character set. To select a symbol, click it, then click the Select button. To insert a symbol, right-click the desired location in the document and select Paste.

Frequently used character codes

For a complete list of characters, see Computer, ASCII Character Code Table, or Unicode Character Tables Organized by Set.

Glyph

Glyph

Currency

Legal symbols

Mathematical symbols

Fractions

Punctuation and dialect symbols

Shape symbols

Commonly used diacritics codes

For a complete list of glyphs and corresponding codes, see.

Glyph

Glyph

Non-printing ASCII control characters

The characters used to control some peripheral devices, such as printers, are numbered 0–31 in the ASCII table. For example, the page feed/new page character is number 12. This character tells the printer to move to the beginning of the next page.

Table of non-printing ASCII control characters

Decimal number

Sign

Decimal number

Sign

Freeing the data channel

Start of title

First device control code

Beginning of text

Second device control code

End of text

Third device control code

End of transmission

Fourth device control code

five-pointed

Negative confirmation

Confirmation

Synchronous transmission mode

Sound signal

End of transmitted data block

Horizontal tabulation

End of media

Line feed/new line

Replacement symbol

Vertical tab

exceed

Page translation/new page

Twelve

File separator

Carriage return

Group separator

Shift without storing bits

Record separator

Bit-preserving shift

fifteen

Data separator

As you know, a computer stores information in binary form, representing it as a sequence of ones and zeros. To translate information into a form convenient for human perception, each unique sequence of numbers is replaced by its corresponding symbol when displayed.

One of the systems for correlating binary codes with printed and control characters is

At the current level of development of computer technology, the user is not required to know the code of each specific character. However, a general understanding of how coding is carried out is extremely useful, and for some categories of specialists, even necessary.

Creating ASCII

The encoding was originally developed in 1963 and then updated twice over the course of 25 years.

In the original version, the ASCII character table included 128 characters; later an extended version appeared, where the first 128 characters were saved, and previously missing characters were assigned to codes with the eighth bit involved.

For many years, this encoding was the most popular in the world. In 2006, Latin 1252 took the leading position, and from the end of 2007 to the present, Unicode has firmly held the leading position.

Computer representation of ASCII

Each ASCII character has its own code, consisting of 8 characters representing a zero or a one. The minimum number in this representation is zero (eight zeros in the binary system), which is the code of the first element in the table.

Two codes in the table were reserved for switching between standard US-ASCII and its national variant.

After ASCII began to include not 128, but 256 characters, an encoding variant became widespread, in which the original version of the table was stored in the first 128 codes with the 8th bit zero. National written characters were stored in the upper half of the table (positions 128-255).

The user does not need to know the ASCII character codes directly. A software developer usually only needs to know the element number in the table to calculate its code using the binary system if necessary.

Russian language

After the development of encodings for the Scandinavian languages, Chinese, Korean, Greek, etc. in the early 70s, the Soviet Union began creating its own version. Soon, a version of an 8-bit encoding called KOI8 was developed, preserving the first 128 ASCII character codes and allocating the same number of positions for letters of the national alphabet and additional characters.

Before the introduction of Unicode, KOI8 dominated the Russian segment of the Internet. There were encoding options for both the Russian and Ukrainian alphabet.

ASCII problems

Since the number of elements even in the extended table did not exceed 256, there was no possibility of accommodating several different scripts in one encoding. In the 90s, the “crocozyabr” problem appeared on the Runet, when texts typed in Russian ASCII characters were displayed incorrectly.

The problem was that the different ASCII codes did not match each other. Let us remember that various characters could be located in positions 128-255, and when changing one Cyrillic encoding to another, all letters of the text were replaced with others having an identical number in a different version of the encoding.

Current state

With the advent of Unicode, the popularity of ASCII began to decline sharply.

The reason for this lies in the fact that the new encoding made it possible to accommodate characters from almost all written languages. In this case, the first 128 ASCII characters correspond to the same characters in Unicode.

In 2000, ASCII was the most popular encoding on the Internet and was used on 60% of web pages indexed by Google. By 2012, the share of such pages had dropped to 17%, and Unicode (UTF-8) took the place of the most popular encoding.

Thus, ASCII is an important part of the history of information technology, but its use in the future seems unpromising.

A computer understands the process of converting it into a form that allows for more convenient transmission, storage or automatic processing of this data. Various tables are used for this purpose. ASCII was the first system developed in the United States for working with English text, which subsequently became widespread throughout the world. The article below is devoted to its description, features, properties and further use.

Display and storage of information in a computer

Symbols on a computer monitor or one or another mobile digital gadget are formed based on sets of vector forms of various characters and a code that allows you to find among them the symbol that needs to be inserted in the right place. It represents a sequence of bits. Thus, each character must uniquely correspond to a set of zeros and ones, which appear in a certain, unique order.

How it all began

Historically, the first computers were English-language. To encode symbolic information in them, it was enough to use only 7 bits of memory, while 1 byte consisting of 8 bits was allocated for this purpose. The number of characters understood by the computer in this case was 128. These characters included the English alphabet with its punctuation marks, numbers and some special characters. The English-language seven-bit encoding with the corresponding table (code page), developed in 1963, was called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Usually, the abbreviation “ASCII encoding” was and is still used to denote it.

Transition to multilingualism

Over time, computers became widely used in non-English speaking countries. In this regard, there was a need for encodings that allow the use of national languages. It was decided not to reinvent the wheel and take ASCII as a basis. The encoding table in the new edition has expanded significantly. The use of the 8th bit made it possible to translate 256 characters into a computer language.

Description

The ASCII encoding has a table that is divided into 2 parts. Only its first half is considered to be a generally accepted international standard. It includes:

  • Characters with serial numbers from 0 to 31, encoded in sequences from 00000000 to 00011111. They are reserved for control characters that control the process of displaying text on the screen or printer, sounding a sound signal, etc.
  • Characters with NN in the table from 32 to 127, encoded by sequences from 00100000 to 01111111 form the standard part of the table. These include space (N 32), letters of the Latin alphabet (lowercase and uppercase), ten-digit numbers from 0 to 9, punctuation marks, brackets of different styles and other symbols.
  • Characters with serial numbers from 128 to 255, encoded by sequences from 10000000 to 11111111. These include letters of national alphabets other than Latin. It is this alternative part of the ASCII table that is used to convert Russian characters into computer form.

Some properties

Features of the ASCII encoding include the difference between the letters “A” - “Z” of lower and upper case by only one bit. This circumstance greatly simplifies register conversion, as well as checking whether it belongs to a given range of values. In addition, all letters in the ASCII encoding system are represented by their own sequence numbers in the alphabet, which are written with 5 digits in the binary number system, preceded by 011 2 for lowercase letters and 010 2 for uppercase letters.

One of the features of the ASCII encoding is the representation of 10 digits - “0” - “9”. In the second number system they start with 00112 and end with 2 number values. Thus, 0101 2 is equivalent to the decimal number five, so the character "5" is written as 0011 01012. Based on the above, you can easily convert BCD numbers into an ASCII string by adding the bit sequence 00112 to each nibble on the left.

"Unicode"

As you know, thousands of characters are required to display texts in the languages ​​of the Southeast Asian group. Such a number of them cannot be described in any way in one byte of information, so even extended versions of ASCII could no longer satisfy the increased needs of users from different countries.

Thus, the need arose to create a universal text encoding, the development of which, in collaboration with many leaders of the global IT industry, was undertaken by the Unicode consortium. Its specialists created the UTF 32 system. In it, 32 bits were allocated to encode 1 character, constituting 4 bytes of information. The main disadvantage was a sharp increase in the amount of required memory by as much as 4 times, which entailed many problems.

At the same time, for most countries with official languages ​​belonging to the Indo-European group, the number of characters equal to 2 32 is more than excessive.

As a result of further work by specialists from the Unicode consortium, the UTF-16 encoding appeared. It became the option for converting symbolic information that suited everyone both in terms of the amount of memory required and the number of encoded characters. That is why UTF-16 was adopted by default and requires 2 bytes to be reserved for one character.

Even this fairly advanced and successful version of Unicode had some drawbacks, and after the transition from the extended version of ASCII to UTF-16, the weight of the document doubled.

In this regard, it was decided to use UTF-8 variable length encoding. In this case, each character of the source text is encoded as a sequence of length from 1 to 6 bytes.

Contact American standard code for information interchange

All Latin characters in UTF-8 variable length are encoded into 1 byte, as in the ASCII encoding system.

A special feature of YTF-8 is that in the case of text in Latin without using other characters, even programs that do not understand Unicode will still be able to read it. In other words, the base ASCII text encoding simply becomes part of the new variable-length UTF. Cyrillic characters in YTF-8 occupy 2 bytes, and, for example, Georgian characters - 3 bytes. By creating UTF-16 and 8, the main problem of creating a single code space in fonts was solved. Since then, font manufacturers can only fill the table with vector forms of text characters based on their needs.

Different operating systems prefer different encodings. To be able to read and edit texts typed in a different encoding, Russian text conversion programs are used. Some text editors contain built-in transcoders and allow you to read text regardless of encoding.

Now you know how many characters are in the ASCII encoding and how and why it was developed. Of course, today the Unicode standard is most widespread in the world. However, we must not forget that it is based on ASCII, so the contribution of its developers to the IT field should be appreciated.

[8-bit encodings: ASCII, KOI-8R and CP1251] The first encoding tables created in the USA did not use the eighth bit in a byte. The text was represented as a sequence of bytes, but the eighth bit was not taken into account (it was used for official purposes).

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) table has become a generally accepted standard. The first 32 characters of the ASCII table (00 to 1F) were used for non-printing characters. They were designed to control a printing device, etc. The rest - from 20 to 7F - are regular (printable) characters.

Table 1 - ASCII encoding

Dec Hex Oct Char Description
0 0 000 null
1 1 001 start of heading
2 2 002 start of text
3 3 003 end of text
4 4 004 end of transmission
5 5 005 inquiry
6 6 006 acknowledge
7 7 007 bell
8 8 010 backspace
9 9 011 horizontal tab
10 A 012 new line
11 B 013 vertical tab
12 C 014 new page
13 D 015 carriage return
14 E 016 shift out
15 F 017 shift in
16 10 020 data link escape
17 11 021 device control 1
18 12 022 device control 2
19 13 023 device control 3
20 14 024 device control 4
21 15 025 negative acknowledge
22 16 026 synchronous idle
23 17 027 end of trans. block
24 18 030 cancel
25 19 031 end of medium
26 1A 032 substitute
27 1B 033 escape
28 1C 034 file separator
29 1D 035 group separator
30 1E 036 record separator
31 1F 037 unit separator
32 20 040 space
33 21 041 !
34 22 042 "
35 23 043 #
36 24 044 $
37 25 045 %
38 26 046 &
39 27 047 "
40 28 050 (
41 29 051 )
42 2A 052 *
43 2B 053 +
44 2C 054 ,
45 2D 055 -
46 2E 056 .
47 2F 057 /
48 30 060 0
49 31 061 1
50 32 062 2
51 33 063 3
52 34 064 4
53 35 065 5
54 36 066 6
55 37 067 7
56 38 070 8
57 39 071 9
58 3A 072 :
59 3B 073 ;
60 3C 074 <
61 3D 075 =
62 3E 076 >
63 3F 077 ?
Dec Hex Oct Char
64 40 100 @
65 41 101 A
66 42 102 B
67 43 103 C
68 44 104 D
69 45 105 E
70 46 106 F
71 47 107 G
72 48 110 H
73 49 111 I
74 4A 112 J
75 4B 113 K
76 4C 114 L
77 4D 115 M
78 4E 116 N
79 4F 117 O
80 50 120 P
81 51 121 Q
82 52 122 R
83 53 123 S
84 54 124 T
85 55 125 U
86 56 126 V
87 57 127 W
88 58 130 X
89 59 131 Y
90 5A 132 Z
91 5B 133 [
92 5C 134 \
93 5D 135 ]
94 5E 136 ^
95 5F 137 _
96 60 140 `
97 61 141 a
98 62 142 b
99 63 143 c
100 64 144 d
101 65 145 e
102 66 146 f
103 67 147 g
104 68 150 h
105 69 151 i
106 6A 152 j
107 6B 153 k
108 6C 154 l
109 6D 155 m
110 6E 156 n
111 6F 157 o
112 70 160 p
113 71 161 q
114 72 162 r
115 73 163 s
116 74 164 t
117 75 165 u
118 76 166 v
119 77 167 w
120 78 170 x
121 79 171 y
122 7A 172 z
123 7B 173 {
124 7C 174 |
125 7D 175 }
126 7E 176 ~
127 7F 177 DEL

As you can easily see, this encoding contains only Latin letters, and those that are used in the English language. There are also arithmetic and other service symbols. But there are neither Russian letters, nor even special Latin ones for German or French. This is easy to explain - the encoding was developed specifically as an American standard. As computers began to be used throughout the world, other characters needed to be encoded.

To do this, it was decided to use the eighth bit in each byte. This made 128 more values ​​available (from 80 to FF) that could be used to encode characters. The first of the eight-bit tables - “extended ASCII” ( Extended ASCII) - included various variants of Latin characters used in some languages ​​of Western Europe. It also contained other additional symbols, including pseudographics.

Pseudographic characters allow you to provide some semblance of graphics by displaying only text characters on the screen. For example, the file management program FAR Manager works using pseudographics.

There were no Russian letters in the Extended ASCII table. Russia (formerly the USSR) and other countries created their own encodings that made it possible to represent specific “national” characters in 8-bit text files - Latin letters of the Polish and Czech languages, Cyrillic (including Russian letters) and other alphabets.

In all encodings that have become widespread, the first 127 characters (that is, the byte value with the eighth bit equal to 0) are the same as ASCII. So an ASCII file works in either of these encodings; The letters of the English language are represented in the same way.

The ISO organization (International Standardization Organization) has adopted the ISO 8859 group of standards. It defines 8-bit encodings for different language groups. So, ISO 8859-1 is an Extended ASCII table for the USA and Western Europe. And ISO 8859-5 is a table for the Cyrillic alphabet (including Russian).

However, for historical reasons, the ISO 8859-5 encoding did not take root. In reality, the following encodings are used for the Russian language:

Code Page 866 (CP866), aka “DOS”, aka “alternative GOST encoding”. Widely used until the mid-90s; now used to a limited extent. Practically not used for distributing texts on the Internet.
- KOI-8. Developed in the 70-80s. It is a generally accepted standard for transmitting email messages on the Russian Internet. It is also widely used in operating systems of the Unix family, including Linux. The Russian-language version of KOI-8 is called KOI-8R; There are versions for other Cyrillic languages ​​(for example, KOI8-U is a version for the Ukrainian language).
- Code Page 1251, CP1251, Windows-1251. Developed by Microsoft to support the Russian language in Windows.

The main advantage of the CP866 was the preservation of pseudo-graphics characters in the same places as in Extended ASCII; therefore, foreign text programs, for example, the famous Norton Commander, could work without changes. The CP866 is now used for Windows programs running in text windows or full-screen text mode, including FAR Manager.

Texts in CP866 have been quite rare in recent years (but it is used to encode Russian file names in Windows). Therefore, we will dwell in more detail on two other encodings - KOI-8R and CP1251.



As you can see, in the CP1251 encoding table, Russian letters are arranged in alphabetical order (with the exception, however, of the letter E). This arrangement makes it very easy for computer programs to sort alphabetically.

But in KOI-8R the order of Russian letters seems random. But actually it is not.

In many older programs, the 8th bit was lost when processing or transmitting text. (Now such programs are practically “extinct”, but in the late 80s - early 90s they were widespread). To get a 7-bit value from an 8-bit value, just subtract 8 from the most significant digit; for example, E1 becomes 61.

Now compare KOI-8R with the ASCII table (Table 1). You will find that Russian letters are placed in clear correspondence with Latin ones. If the eighth bit disappears, lowercase Russian letters turn into uppercase Latin letters, and uppercase Russian letters turn into lowercase Latin letters. So, E1 in KOI-8 is the Russian “A”, while 61 in ASCII is the Latin “a”.

So, KOI-8 allows you to maintain the readability of Russian text when the 8th bit is lost. “Hello everyone” becomes “pRIWET WSEM”.

Recently, both the alphabetical order of characters in the encoding table and readability with the loss of the 8th bit have lost their decisive importance. The eighth bit in modern computers is not lost during transmission or processing. And alphabetical sorting is done taking into account the encoding, and not by simply comparing codes. (By the way, the CP1251 codes are not completely arranged alphabetically - the letter E is not in its place).

Due to the fact that there are two common encodings, when working with the Internet (mail, browsing Web sites), you can sometimes see a meaningless set of letters instead of Russian text. For example, “I AM SBYUFEMHEL.” These are just the words “with respect”; but they were encoded in CP1251 encoding, and the computer decoded the text using the KOI-8 table. If the same words, on the contrary, were encoded in KOI-8, and the computer decoded the text according to the CP1251 table, the result would be “U HCHBTSEOYEN”.

Sometimes it happens that a computer deciphers Russian-language letters using a table not intended for the Russian language. Then, instead of Russian letters, a meaningless set of symbols appears (for example, Latin letters of Eastern European languages); they are often called “crocozybras”.

In most cases, modern programs cope with determining the encodings of Internet documents (emails and Web pages) independently. But sometimes they “misfire”, and then you can see strange sequences of Russian letters or “krokozyabry”. As a rule, in such a situation, to display real text on the screen, it is enough to select the encoding manually in the program menu.

Information from the page http://open-office.edusite.ru/TextProcessor/p5aa1.html was used for this article.

Material taken from the site:

According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2016, three and a half billion people used the Internet with some regularity. Most of them don’t even think about the fact that any messages they send via PC or mobile gadgets, as well as texts that are displayed on all kinds of monitors, are actually combinations of 0 and 1. This representation of information is called encoding. It ensures and greatly facilitates its storage, processing and transmission. In 1963, the American ASCII encoding was developed, which is the subject of this article.

Presenting information on a computer

From the point of view of any electronic computer, text is a set of individual characters. These include not only letters, including capital ones, but also punctuation marks and numbers. In addition, special characters “=”, “&”, “(” and spaces are used.

The set of characters that make up the text is called the alphabet, and their number is called cardinality (denoted as N). To determine it, the expression N = 2^b is used, where b is the number of bits or the information weight of a particular symbol.

It has been proven that an alphabet with a capacity of 256 characters can represent all the necessary characters.

Since 256 represents the 8th power of two, the weight of each character is 8 bits.

A unit of measurement of 8 bits is called 1 byte, so it is customary to say that any character in text stored on a computer takes up one byte of memory.

How is coding done?

Any texts are entered into the memory of a personal computer using keyboard keys on which numbers, letters, punctuation marks and other symbols are written. They are transferred to RAM in binary code, i.e. each character is associated with a decimal code familiar to humans, from 0 to 255, which corresponds to a binary code - from 00000000 to 11111111.

Byte-byte character encoding allows the processor performing text processing to access each character individually. At the same time, 256 characters are quite enough to represent any symbolic information.

ASCII character encoding

This abbreviation in English stands for code for information interchange.

Even at the dawn of computerization, it became obvious that it was possible to come up with a wide variety of ways to encode information. However, to transfer information from one computer to another, it was necessary to develop a unified standard. So, in 1963, the ASCII encoding table appeared in the USA. In it, any symbol of the computer alphabet is associated with its serial number in binary representation. ASCII was originally used only in the United States and later became an international standard for PCs.

ASCII codes are divided into 2 parts. Only the first half of this table is considered the international standard. It includes characters with serial numbers from 0 (coded as 00000000) to 127 (coded 01111111).

Serial number

ASCII text encoding

Symbol

0000 0000 - 0001 1111

Characters with N from 0 to 31 are called control characters. Their function is to “manage” the process of displaying text on a monitor or printing device, giving a sound signal, etc.

0010 0000 - 0111 1111

Characters from N from 32 to 127 (standard part of the table) - upper and lowercase letters of the Latin alphabet, 10th digits, punctuation marks, as well as various brackets, commercial and other symbols. The character 32 represents a space.

1000 0000 - 1111 1111

Characters with N from 128 to 255 (alternative part of the table or code page) can have different variants, each of which has its own number. The code page is used to specify national alphabets that are different from Latin. In particular, it is with its help that ASCII encoding for Russian characters is carried out.

In the table, the encodings are capitalized and follow each other in alphabetical order, and the numbers are in ascending order. This principle remains the same for the Russian alphabet.

Control characters

The ASCII encoding table was originally created for receiving and transmitting information via a device that has not been used for a long time, such as a teletype. In this regard, non-printable characters were included in the character set, used as commands to control this device. Similar commands were used in such pre-computer messaging methods as Morse code, etc.

The most common teletype character is NUL (00). It is still used today in most programming languages ​​to indicate the end of a line.

Where is ASCII encoding used?

The American Standard Code is needed not only for entering text information on the keyboard. It is also used in graphics. In particular, in ASCII Art Maker, the images of the various extensions represent a spectrum of ASCII characters.

There are two types of such products: those that perform the function of graphic editors by converting images into text and those that convert “drawings” into ASCII graphics. For example, the famous emoticon is a prime example of an encoding symbol.

ASCII can also be used when creating an HTML document. In this case, you can enter a certain set of characters, and when viewing the page, a symbol that corresponds to this code will appear on the screen.

ASCII is also necessary for creating multilingual websites, since characters that are not included in a specific national table are replaced with ASCII codes.

Some features

ASCII was originally used to encode text information using 7 bits (one was left blank), but today it works as 8 bits.

The letters located in the columns located above and below differ from each other in only one single bit. This significantly reduces the complexity of the audit.

Using ASCII in Microsoft Office

If necessary, this type of text information encoding can be used in Microsoft text editors such as Notepad and Office Word. However, you may not be able to use some functions when typing in this case. For example, you won't be able to use bold text because ASCII encoding only preserves the meaning of the information, ignoring its general appearance and form.

Standardization

The ISO organization has adopted ISO 8859 standards. This group defines eight-bit encodings for different language groups. Specifically, ISO 8859-1 is an Extended ASCII table for the United States and Western European countries. And ISO 8859-5 is a table used for the Cyrillic alphabet, including the Russian language.

For a number of historical reasons, the ISO 8859-5 standard was used for a very short time.

For the Russian language, the following encodings are actually used at the moment:

  • CP866 (Code Page 866) or DOS, which is often called alternative GOST encoding. It was actively used until the mid-90s of the last century. At the moment it is practically not used.
  • KOI-8. The encoding was developed in the 1970s and 80s, and is currently the generally accepted standard for email messages on the RuNet. It is widely used in Unix operating systems, including Linux. The “Russian” version of KOI-8 is called KOI-8R. In addition, there are versions for other Cyrillic languages, such as Ukrainian.
  • Code Page 1251 (CP 1251, Windows - 1251). Developed by Microsoft to provide support for the Russian language in the Windows environment.

The main advantage of the first CP866 standard was the preservation of pseudographic characters in the same positions as in Extended ASCII. This made it possible to run foreign-made text programs, such as the famous Norton Commander, without modifications. Currently, CP866 is used for programs developed for Windows that run in full-screen text mode or in text windows, including FAR Manager.

Computer texts written in CP866 encoding are quite rare these days, but it is the one that is used for Russian file names in Windows.

"Unicode"

At the moment, this encoding is the most widely used. Unicode codes are divided into areas. The first (U+0000 to U+007F) includes ASCII characters with codes. This is followed by the character areas of various national scripts, as well as punctuation marks and technical symbols. In addition, some Unicode codes are reserved in case there is a need to include new characters in the future.

Now you know that in ASCII, each character is represented as a combination of 8 zeros and ones. To non-specialists, this information may seem unnecessary and uninteresting, but don’t you want to know what’s going on “in the brains” of your PC?!