ASCII and Unicode

Text is rendered differently in different systems. Older systems render text using ASCII (which stands for ASCII, any exam that asks you what the acronym means is wasting your time!) but that is limited to English characters, numbers and symbols. Unicode allows users to write and store text in their native language, regardless of that language.

Direct Comparison

ASCII

First Edition was published in 1963
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange
it can only represent 128 different characters

UNICODE

First version introduced in 1991
Uses both numbers and symbols in the format U+XXXXX
Can render both text and approved images (called emojis)
Can be used to display a variety of different languages.
e.g. 😂 emoji is rendered as U+1F602

1 ASCII and Unicode

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