ASCII is a code for teleprinter operators, limited to 128 characters including letters, digits, and punctuation marks. ASCII art uses these characters to create images and emoticons.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a code created for the use of teleprinter operators. It is pronounced /ASK ee/, not ASCII. The ASCII code is limited to a specific set of 128 characters, of which the first 32 are set aside, and the remaining 98 include all 26 letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case, the digits zero through nine, punctuation marks – exclamation point, left and right brackets and curly and square brackets, comma, dash, period, colon, semicolon, single and double quotation marks and question mark: the grave and caret accent, front slash, backslash and pipe, pound sign, dollar sign, percent sign, ampersand, asterisk, underscore, plus sign, and tilde. These are the characters used in ASCII art and the whole collection looks like this:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU VWXYZ
abcdefgh I jklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
! ( ) { } ( ), – . : ; ‘” ?
` ˆ / | # $ % & * _ + ~
These are named in logical groups, but if the last three groups are rearranged, it becomes clear that they are mostly the uppercase and lowercase versions on some keyboard keys, just like the alphabet is
~! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + { } | : “ ?
` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 – = ( ) ; ‘/
The remaining characters are the semicolon, for which uppercase elements are not used on the keys.
To create ASCII art, the specified characters are arranged in lines, with spaces between, to create the lines, shapes and shading of the images, sometimes forming representative shapes, and sometimes just aiming to create an overall impression. While there are a few programs for converting images to ASCII art, sometimes called ASCII art generators, their success varies—some have much better results than others. ASCII art is often built into a text editor so as not to introduce any unwanted formatting because spacing is crucial to the success of the piece. There are also ASCII editors for creating ASCII art. Emoticons can be considered the simplest form of ASCII art.
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