The most popular computer coding schemes include ascii, numeric, and ebcdic.

To represent numeric, alphabetic, and special characters in a computer's internal storage and on magnetic media, we must use some sort of coding system. In computers, the code is made up of fixed size groups of binary positions. Each binary position in a group is assigned a specific value; for example 8, 4, 2, or 1. In this way, every character can be represented by a combination of bits that is different from any other combination.

In this section you will learn how the selected coding systems are used to represent data. The coding systems included are Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), and American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).

ASCII ( abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is acharacter-encoding scheme (the IANA prefers the name US-ASCII). ASCII codes represent text in computers,communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters. ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when it was surpassed by UTF-8, which includes ASCII as a subset.

ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963,a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986.Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.

Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit binary integers as shown by the ASCII chart on the right.The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, and aspace. For example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many now obsolete) that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, including the space(which is considered an invisible graphic:223).Find more

EBCDIC(pronounced "ebb see dick") is short for extended binary coded decimal interchange code is eight bits, or one byte, wide. This is a coding system used to represent characters-letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols in computerized text. A character is represented in EBCDIC by eight bit. EBCDIC mainly used on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computeroperating systems. Each byte consists of two nibbles, each four bits wide. The first four bits define the class of character, while the second nibble defines the specific character inside that class.

EBCDIC is different from, and incompatible with, the ASCII character set used by all other computers. The EBCDIC code allows for 256 different characters. For personal computers, however, ASCII is the standard. If you want to move text between your computer and a mainframe, you can get a file conversion utility that will convert between EBCDIC and ASCII.

EBCDIC was adapted from the character codes used in IBM's pre electronic PUNCHED CARD machines, which made it less than ideal for modern computers. Among its many inconveniences were the use of non-contiguous codes for the alphabetic characters, and the absence of several punctuation characters such as the square brackets [] used by much modern software.

For example, setting the first nibble to all-ones,1111, defines the character as a number, and the second nibble defines which number is encoded. EBCDIC can code up to 256 different characters.

There have been six or more incompatible versions of EBCDIC, the latest of which do include all the ASCII characters, but also contain characters that are not supported in ASCII.More information click HERE

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more than 120,000 characters covering 129 modern and historicscripts, as well as multiple symbol sets. The standard consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and set of standard character encodings, a set of reference data files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules fornormalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).[1] As of June 2015, the most recent version is Unicode 8.0. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium.

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization ofcomputer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, the Java programming language, and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsoleteUCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same code values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit (two 8-bit bytes) for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard. UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units (4 × 8 bit) to handle each of the additional characters.More information click HERE

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Any text-based data is stored by the computer in the form of bits(a series of 1s and 0s), and follows the specified Coding Scheme. The coding scheme is a Standard which tells the user’s machine which character represents which set of bytes. Specifying the coding scheme used is very important as without it, the machine could interpret the given bytes as a different character than intended.
For Example : 0x6B may be interpreted as character ‘k’ in ASCII, but as the character ‘, ‘ in the less commonly used EBCDIC coding scheme.

ASCII(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) : ASCII may be considered the most widespread coding scheme used. Developed by the American Standards Association, ASCII was introduced in 1963 as ASA X3.4-1963. It has definitions for 128 characters- 0x00 to 0x7f, which are represented by 7 bits.
In ASCII Format-

Characters Decimal Hexadecimal

0-9 48-57 30-39

A-Z 65-90 41-5A

a-z 97-122 61-7A

The rest of the Hexadecimal is filled with other special characters and punctuation.
UTF-32 (Unicode Transformation Format 32-bit) : UTF-32 is a coding scheme utilizing 4 bytes to represent a character. It is a fixed length scheme, that is, each character is always represented by 4 bytes. It was used to represent all of Unicode’s 1, 112, 064 code points.
Due to the large space requirements of this scheme, it was made obsolete by the later developed more efficient schemes.
UTF-16(Unicode Transformation Format 16-bit) : UTF-32 is a coding scheme utilizing either 2 or 4 bytes to represent a character. It can represent all of Unicode’s 1, 112, 064 code points.
UTF-8(Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit) : Introduced in 1993, UTF-8 is a coding scheme which requires each character to be represented by at least 1 byte. It can represent all of Unicode’s code points. UTF-8 is a super-set of ASCII, as the first 128 characters, from 0x00 to 0x7f, are the same as ASCII. Thus, this UTF scheme is reverse Compatible with ASCII. It is a variable length encoding, with either 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes used to represent a character.
In order to indicate that two(or more) consecutive bytes are the part of same character, or represent two different characters, the first few bits of each byte are used as indicators.
ISCII(Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) : It is a coding scheme which can accommodate the characters used by various Indian scripts. It is an 8-bit scheme.
The First 128 characters are the same as ASCII, and only the next 128 bit space is used to represent ISCII specific characters.