What is the Difference Between Unicode and ASCII?

The main differences between Unicode and ASCII are:

1. Scope: ASCII is a character encoding system that includes up to 256 characters, primarily composed of English letters, numbers, and symbols. In contrast, Unicode is a much larger encoding standard that includes over 149,000 characters and can represent nearly every modern script and language in the world.
2. Encoding Mechanism: ASCII uses a fixed-length encoding mechanism, with each character represented using seven or eight bits. Unicode uses variable-length encoding, meaning each character can be represented using one or more bytes.
3. Character Set: ASCII is a subset of the Unicode encoding scheme and is limited to the representation of English text. Unicode, on the other hand, is a more versatile and widely used encoding scheme that can represent characters from multiple languages and scripts, including mathematical symbols and other specialized characters.
4. Standardization: Unicode is standardized, while ASCII is not.

In summary, ASCII is a simpler encoding scheme limited to the representation of English text, while Unicode is a more versatile and widely used encoding scheme that can represent characters from multiple languages and scripts.

Comparative Table: Unicode vs ASCII

Here is a table comparing the differences between Unicode and ASCII:

Unicode is a more comprehensive and versatile encoding scheme than ASCII, as it can represent characters from multiple languages and scripts, including mathematical symbols and other specialized characters. ASCII, on the other hand, is a subset of Unicode and represents a limited range of characters primarily used in the English language.