CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

CCS Standards

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89

ASCII

Most readers of this book are familiar with the ASCII character set, so it is a good place to

begin our discussion of coded character set standards and will serve as a common point

of reference.

e ASCII character set is covered in this book because it is quite oen mixed with CJKV

characters within text. Note, however, that the ASCII character set standard is not specic

to any CJKV locale.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. e ASCII char-

acter set standard is described in the standard designated ANSI X3.4-1986;

*

it is the U.S.

version and at the same time the International Reference Version (IRV) of ISO 646:1991,

†

which denes the framework for related national standards.

e ASCII character set is composed of 128 characters, 94 of which are considered print-

able. ere are also 34 other characters, which include a space character and many control

characters, such as Tab, Escape, Shi-in, and so on, which are dened in ISO 6429:1992,

entitled Information Technology—Control Functions for Coded Character Sets. e control

codes are technically not part of ASCII nor ISO 646:1991. Table 3-13 lists the 94 printable

ASCII characters.

e ASCII character setTable 3-13.

Character class Characters

Lowercase Latin

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Uppercase Latin

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Numerals

0123456789

Symbols

!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}