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Topic: ASCII Codes |
Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 12:19 pm |
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http://www.asciitable.com/
Those of you who, like me, have been brought up on computers since before DOS, are very aware of ASCII, which is the American Standard Code for Information Exchange, but a lot of computer users these days have never used DOS or CPM or Pascal, and are completely unaware of how the keyboard works.
When you type a letter into the keyboard, the keyboard doesn't send that letter to the computer, it sends its ASCII code. You can actually type everything using the numeric keypad if you really want to, just by holding down the <ALT> key and typing the ASCII code for each letter. This might seem like a waste of time, unless you try typing a letter in French with an English keyboard, and notice that some of the letters are missing. Likewise, you might want to send the £ sign and have an American keyboard. Yes, you can bring up the Character Map, but the easiest thing is to know that £ is ASCII character number 156 and just type <ALT>156. Since keyboards are designed to use ASCII, it works in almost every program.
Here is the table of ASCII characters...
Remember, you HAVE to use the Numeric Keypad, the numbers on the top row of the keyboard don't work. |
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Jack Stoner
From:
Kansas City, MO
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 3:47 pm
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| I've worked in computers since 1962, including a stint as a NASA Telemetry Processor programmer (machine language). I had to know the ASCII code for the 8 character paper tapes that the Telemetry Processor used to load programs. But, with modern computers, except for special circumstances such as a foreign language special characters, there is really no need to know how to do that. In the US, most users do not have a need for that and probably have never accessed or even know there is a character map. |
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Jim Smith
From:
Midlothian, TX, USA
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 7:00 pm
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To be perfectly correct, ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". 
As an old C programmer, I've had little use to type regular or extended ASCII codes, but I used them all the time for serial communication to/from devices like gas pumps and card readers. |
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Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 7:51 pm
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| Jim Smith wrote: |
| To be perfectly correct, ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". ... |
Yes, that's what I intented to type. Must have been a "senior moment".   |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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John Cipriano
From:
San Francisco
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 8:56 pm
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And to be perfectly perfectly correct, it should be mentioned that, strictly speaking, the table shows a DOS variant of Extended ASCII called Code page 437.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
On Windows you're not going to get the graphical characters above 127 if you put in those codes. I'm not sure off the top of my head but you probably get what's in ISO Latin-1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1
Good stuff though. This is the sort of thing that nobody teaches you but which you end up scratching your head to figure out how to do.
Wiz: I get this...¡∞£¡§•¡∞£  |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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Posted 24 Jan 2010 9:03 pm
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Back in the early days, in the mid 90's, I learned to create ASCII art using my number pad and a lot of creativity. AOL had a room dedicated to ASCII Art and people let whole pages of it fly. It is fabulous stuff to tinker with. I'll try to dig up some old picture codes and try them out.
_________________
"Wiz" Feinberg, Moderator SGF Computers Forum
Security Consultant
Twitter: @Wizcrafts
Main web pages: Wiztunes Steel Guitar website | Wiz's Security Blog | My Webmaster Services | Wiz's Security Blog |
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Dave Boothroyd
From:
Staffordshire Moorlands
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Posted 25 Jan 2010 2:21 am
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I still find it annoying that we have card suits, pointless musical quavers, and silly faces, but no proper "Flat" sign.
I know you can use a lower case b, but it's only a work-around.
I could rant on......
but I won't.
It's annoying. There are not enough musicians in computer design- or in those long ago days, there were not enough.
Cheers
Dave |
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John Cipriano
From:
San Francisco
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Posted 25 Jan 2010 1:33 pm
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Well, there's room in Unicode for the flat sign, and a lot of other things:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/266d
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/266f
To display it, though, your browser must support Unicode and the font used must have that symbol. Office shipped with Arial Unicode since at least 2000. I don't know about XP but I'm sure Vista and 7 have it.
Also, it can be tricky trying to input them in forums. Sometimes you can just type them in but sometimes the forum itself doesn't support Unicode.
This shows up for me as a flat sign --> ♭ |
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Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 25 Jan 2010 3:26 pm
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| John Cipriano wrote: |
...On Windows you're not going to get the graphical characters above 127 if you put in those codes. I'm not sure off the top of my head but you probably get what's in ISO Latin-1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1... |
Right. If you use Wordpad or Notepad you're going to get different characters about 127. What I miss is the box parts. I used to use T/Master for spreadsheets, and drawing boxes was a fundimental part of it.
Anyone else used to use T/Master ? It was created by Peter Roizen, and had the advantage of being a spreadsheet/word processor/database all in one, and you could have all types on one sheet. Unfortunately, when Windows 95 came around he couldn't keep up with all the reams of specifications and gave up on it. About the time Windows 95 was being worked on I went round to see him and he showed my the volumes of paperwork that MicroSoft had sent him. You would need three secretaries just to read it.  |
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John Swindle
From:
Oregon, USA
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Posted 29 Jan 2010 10:58 pm
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For my own use, I keep a file handy containing a sharp, a flat and a natural. The symbols can be pasted into any of my software and it works out well. However, I have little confidence that it would work as well on everyone else's web browser or word processor.
I'll post them here, for anyone who wants to cut-and-paste, but I won't be surprised to hear that some of you get only gibberish instead of these symbols: ♭ ♯ ♮ |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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Posted 29 Jan 2010 11:28 pm
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| John Swindle wrote: |
For my own use, I keep a file handy containing a sharp, a flat and a natural. The symbols can be pasted into any of my software and it works out well. However, I have little confidence that it would work as well on everyone else's web browser or word processor.
I'll post them here, for anyone who wants to cut-and-paste, but I won't be surprised to hear that some of you get only gibberish instead of these symbols: ♭ ♯ ♮ |
I see all three music symbols in Firefox 3.5.7, running on Windows XP Professional.
_________________
"Wiz" Feinberg, Moderator SGF Computers Forum
Security Consultant
Twitter: @Wizcrafts
Main web pages: Wiztunes Steel Guitar website | Wiz's Security Blog | My Webmaster Services | Wiz's Security Blog |
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Dave Boothroyd
From:
Staffordshire Moorlands
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Posted 30 Jan 2010 3:18 am
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They come up correctly on my Mac too, also in Firefox, and when I paste them into Word they appear to be symbols in a Japanese Font, Pro6.
They look fine though, so I don't have a problem with that.
For obvious reasons, I have never spent much time looking at Japanese fonts, so I would never have found musical symbols on there.
Thanks,
Cheers
Dave |
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