What is "ascii"

ASCII (acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which in Portuguese means "American Standard Code for Information Exchange", but we commonly use the English acronym for direct reference) is a seven-bit character encoding based on the English alphabet. Each sequence of codes in the ASCII table corresponds to a character, commonly represented by the 8 bits (equivalent to one byte), and the eighth bit (right to left) serves as a parity bit, used for error detection. ASCII codes represent text on computers, communication equipment, and other text-based devices. Developed from 1960, much of the modern character encodings inherited it as a basis.

The encoding defines 128 characters, completely filling the seven bits available in 27=128 possible sequences. Of these, 33 are not printable, as control characters currently not usable for text editing, but widely used in communication devices, which affect word processing.