Character Storage

Question 1

What is a character set?

Answer 1

• A character set is a table that matches together a character and a binary value.

Question 2

Why are character sets necessary?

Answer 2

• They allow computers to exchange data and humans to input characters.

Question 3

ASCII:

Answer 3

• A common character set which doesn’t take up too much space.
• ASCII uses 1 byte (8 bits) which gives 256 possible characters.
• Can’t be used for all punctuation symbols or other languages

Question 4

Unicode:

Answer 4

• Popular character set because it uses 2 bytes (16 bits) that allow for 65,536 possible characters.
• Allows many different languages to be represented, as well as thousands of symbols and emojis.
• It requires more memory to store each character than ASCII as it uses an extra byte.

Question 5

File Size Calculation:

Answer 5

Bits per character * Number of characters