Question

What is Unicode, ASCII and ANSI?
I realize they are character-encoding schemes? I read a bit about them, but it was a bit confusing to be introduced to them all at once.
(There's this thing that ASCII is included in UNICODE...ASCI is English-based..got confused)
But don't let my pre-readings fool you. I'm a total newbie. I barely know what binary is, Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

ASCII is subset of UNICODE..
ascii characters are 7 bits in size where as unicode characters are of 16 bits.
so ascii character can have value from 0 to 127 while unicode have 2power16(even more than this).
of course , it's an encoding scheme

Answer 2

and what is ANSI? =)

Answer 3

and do you mean that ASCII codes are compatible with UNICODE and if yes, is it backwards or forwards compatible ?

Answer 4

what do you mean by backwards or forwards compatible??
ascii is a character encoding system which contains less numbers of characters which unicode characters are huge in numbers (including all those in ASCII)

Answer 5

From wikipedia: "Unicode has become the dominant scheme for internal processing and storage of text (although a great deal of text is still stored in legacy encodings, Unicode is used almost exclusively for building new information processing systems)"

Which is newer? ASCII or unicode? and did ASCII derive from unicode? or the opposite?
or were they two different encodings and joined forces?

I'm sorry if I'm flooding you with questions :D I'm just really confused and am a hard core newbie. Maybe MIT 6.00 is too big for a first step for me.

Answer 6

Also, from wikipedia: "ASCII was incorporated into the Unicode character set as the first 128 symbols, so the ASCII characters have the same numeric codes in both sets. This allows UTF-8 to be backward compatible with ASCII, a significant advantage." ;)

but it's still not clear for me..that's what's got me confused

Answer 7

see ascii is 7 bit encoding system so it can have a maximum of 128 characters but in world there are more than 128 characters. so there should be some encoding system which support all the symbols and characters from various languages of the world (including those characters of ascii); one of such is unicode which is 16 bit encoding system which can support more than 2pow16 characters. you need to learn what is meant by encoding system ?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding
there are much more like UTF8,LATIN-1,UTF16 etc

Answer 8

well, @NanZy you should take some reserch online before asking that question. With a simple querry on Google! you may have a plenty of information.

Answer 9

As I said, I did. The more I did research, the more I got confused. Reading one article on Wikipedia leads me to reading 10 more --While other websites don't provide much answers-- I have been doing so for the past two weeks but I got a bit frustrated. I am not lazy and I haven't and will not stop 'googling'. But simply, I wanted the outlines of the definition of these terms and thought that someone especially a 'learner' could provide me with a simple explanation for them.
I only have general knowledge about HTML. This is technically my first app. programming steps.
And I feel that it has so many terms and definitions, all branching out into hundreds of other terms and definitions.
And exactly as @sontung1404 said, With a simple query on Google! you may have "PLENTY" of information.
Mind my long reply, I AM frustrated.

Answer 10

OK, it's not really important that you must get exactly the definition of Unicode.
Unicode is the way you encode characters (like `a`, `/`....) . Remember that computers only understand numbers, you must convert characters (what you want to tell your computer) into its language (numbers) so the computer understand what you mean.
Unicode is the way to encoding characters according to some rules. ASCII is one of those.

Now, take a look at how to encoding in Python using ASCII

```
unichr(97)
>>> u'a'
ord('a')
>>> 97
```
More information: http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html
When you search online I strongly recommend you including the name of the language you want to see, like "unicode python" then you probably have a better result
Good luck!

Answer 11

"Encoding in Python using ASCII" isn't really what I inquired but thank you anyway.