| ASCII
Bland, unformatted text files are best saved in ASCII (pronounced "askee")
format. But ASCII is more than a text file format--it's a standard
developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to define
how computers write and read characters. The ASCII set of 128 characters
includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and control codes (such as a
character that marks the end of a line). Each letter or other character is
represented by a number: an uppercase A, for example, is the number 65,
and a lowercase z is the number 122. Most operating systems use the ASCII
standard, except for Windows NT, which uses the suitably larger and newer
Unicode standard. |