What's the difference between ASCII and Unicode?

unicode ascii
Ashvitha picture Ashvitha · Oct 6, 2013 · Viewed 457.8k times · Source

What's the exact difference between Unicode and ASCII?

ASCII has a total of 128 characters (256 in the extended set).

Is there any size specification for Unicode characters?

Answer

Kerrek SB picture Kerrek SB · Oct 6, 2013

ASCII defines 128 characters, which map to the numbers 0–127. Unicode defines (less than) 221 characters, which, similarly, map to numbers 0–221 (though not all numbers are currently assigned, and some are reserved).

Unicode is a superset of ASCII, and the numbers 0–127 have the same meaning in ASCII as they have in Unicode. For example, the number 65 means "Latin capital 'A'".

Because Unicode characters don't generally fit into one 8-bit byte, there are numerous ways of storing Unicode characters in byte sequences, such as UTF-32 and UTF-8.

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