What’s the difference between ASCII and Unicode

asciiunicode

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?

Best Answer

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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Best way to convert text files between character sets

Stand-alone utility approach

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt

-f ENCODING  the encoding of the input
-t ENCODING  the encoding of the output

You don't have to specify either of these arguments. They will default to your current locale, which is usually UTF-8.

Python – How to get the ASCII value of a character

From here:

The function ord() gets the int value of the char. And in case you want to convert back after playing with the number, function chr() does the trick.

>>> ord('a')
97
>>> chr(97)
'a'
>>> chr(ord('a') + 3)
'd'
>>>

In Python 2, there was also the unichr function, returning the Unicode character whose ordinal is the unichr argument:

>>> unichr(97)
u'a'
>>> unichr(1234)
u'\u04d2'

In Python 3 you can use chr instead of unichr.

ord() - Python 3.6.5rc1 documentation

ord() - Python 2.7.14 documentation

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Python – How to get the ASCII value of a character

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