Understanding ASCII and Unicode (GCSE)

A short tutorial which explains what ASCII and Unicode are, how they work, and what the difference is between them, for students studying GCSE Computer Science.

[laithfadala]

One of the most beautiful arts is making complicated things look so simple. And only legends can do it.

[PhsycoCovers]

We watch this video in my computer class at school 😂 it’s very well put together, good job.

[JohnDoe-rtms]

Perfect. Simple, easy and straightfoward 10/10 Great explanation!

[hirok]

Chinese: Im gonna end ASCII's whole career.

[christinesimmons]

Simple, clear instructions- very helpful. Thank you!

[cadalacgrant]

Well explained and I love the “Try It Yourself”

[Vlexvnder]

Fantastic, thank you for the clarity. Have read blog posts and seen videos on this topic and never understood it quite so well.

[Liggliluff]

(4:30) You should preferably save in UTF-8 instead, that uses 1–7 bits per character depending on how far into Unicode it appears. – Furthermore, you can't use characters beyond the 1 114 111th character, due to how the standard is set up with the 16-bit surrogate pairs.

[davinderthakur]

This video explains it beautifully and very easy to understand. Thanks for the great content

[PyarMatKaro]

The explanation is wrong. When saved in UNICODE format, Notepad adds a two-byte magic number to mark the file format as being UTF-16, and the ALT-1 character is saved as two bytes. Notepad does not save in a 32-bit UNICODE format. You can verify this by putting the ALT-1 character in the file twice, and see that the file size is then 6 bytes. Also, UTF-16 encodes up to 20 bits, not 32 as stated.

[jndominica]

Keyboard keys have a different number asociated to them that gets translated into "ASCII" later, upper or lower case depending on whether Shift was held down. PS/2 scancode for A is 0x1E. You skipped over intermediate word lengths. For most of the history, a character has been 8 bits, and later 16 bits. Having so many bits comes at cost.

The Notepad shortcut might be something found in newest Windows only. A Unicode text file is usually prefixed with a technical character called a "byte order mark" to indicate the UTF format. Saving one symbol will actually save two.

[wing]

Clean and clear, super well presented. Thank you for contributing great quality information on this platform. It's a breath of fresh air.

[Partida]

The greatest teachers are the ones that can simplify the most complicated of things. Bravo to you!! tysm for the vid :)

[fun_with_mtivation]

Your method of teaching is so simple and amazing...means it's easy to understand..💗❤️🙂

[moroseten]

Thank you made this very easy to understand!

[Saquib]

You guys explain this better then what my prof. did over 2 hours. lolz

[RobSwizze]

Okay, I have gone through maybe 13 other videos including a video by my instructor, and all of them were not as simple and easy as you made this explanation out to be. Thank you for making this. I'm finally understanding it!

[TheGryphon]

For UTF-8, there are 21 free bits. So the highest possible code point will be 2097151 (decimal) or (hex)

[NathanOkun]

ASCII is an extension of the 5-bit Badau Code used in such things as the original electro-mechanical Teletype Keyboard/Printer long-distance communication devices that replaced the old hand-keyed dit-dah Morse Code when more capable and much faster methods of sending on/off (digital) codes were developed at the end of the 19th Century. Much of ASCII was adopted to allow more characters to be sent and to allow more thorough control of the receiving device (End-of-Message value and so forth) for more intricate messages (for example, the Escape Code as a flag to allow non-ASCII values to be sent for use by the receiving machine as other than letters or numbers or standard symbols or ASCII Printer Commands). Sending pictures is another major extension of ASCII where the original printable characters are now just a small part of the image printed out. UNICODE is one part of this expansion but such things as "JPG" and "MP4" and other special-purpose coding schemes are now also used extensively for inter-computer messaging. Automatic "handshaking" and error determination are now absolutely needed for computer messaging that is going much too fast for human monitoring of the connections -- this can get extremely complex when automatic backup systems with quick-swapping paths are used.

[basnugroho]

This is what im looking for this morning