Extended ASCII


Extended ASCII character encodings are eight-bit or larger encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters, plus additional characters. Using the term "extended ASCII" on its own is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters or that the term unambiguously identifies a single encoding, neither of which is the case.
There are many extended ASCII encodings. EBCDIC likewise developed many extended variants over the decades.

History

ASCII was designed in the 1960s for teleprinters and telegraphy, and some computing. Early teleprinters were electromechanical, having no microprocessor and just enough electromechanical memory to function. They fully processed one character at a time, returning to an idle state immediately afterward; this meant that any control sequences had to be only one character long, and thus a large number of codes needed to be reserved for such controls. They were typewriter-derived impact printers, and could only print a fixed set of glyphs, which were cast into a metal type element or elements; this also encouraged a minimum set of glyphs.
Seven-bit ASCII improved over prior five- and six-bit codes. Of the 27=128 codes, 33 were used for controls, and 95 carefully selected printable characters, which include the English alphabet, digits, and 31 punctuation marks and symbols: all of the symbols on a standard US typewriter plus a few selected for programming tasks. Some popular peripherals only implemented a 64-printing-character subset: Teletype Model 33 could not transmit "a" through "z" or five less-common symbols. and when they received such characters they instead printed "A" through "Z" and five other mostly-similar symbols.
The ASCII character set is barely large enough for US English use and lacks many glyphs common in typesetting, and far too small for universal use. Many more letters and symbols are desirable, useful, or required to directly represent letters of alphabets other than English, more kinds of punctuation and spacing, more mathematical operators and symbols, some unique symbols used by some programming languages, ideograms, logograms, box-drawing characters, etc. For years, applications were designed around the 64-character set and/or the 95-character set, so several characters acquired new uses. For example, ASCII lacks "÷", so most programming languages use "/" to indicate division.
The biggest problem for computer users around the world was other alphabets. ASCII's English alphabet almost accommodates European languages, if accented letters are replaced by non-accented letters or two-character approximations. Modified variants of 7-bit ASCII appeared promptly, trading some lesser-used symbols for highly desired symbols or letters, such as replacing "#" with "£" on UK Teletypes, "\" with "¥" in Japan or "₩" in Korea, etc. At least 29 variant sets resulted. 12 code points were modified by at least one modified set, leaving only 82 "invariant" codes. Programming languages however had assigned meaning to many of the replaced characters, work-arounds were devised such as C three-character sequences "??" to represent "". Languages with dissimilar basic alphabets could use transliteration, such as replacing all the Latin letters with the closest match Cyrillic letters. Schemes were also devised so that two letters could be overprinted to produce accented letters. Users were not comfortable with any of these compromises and they were often poorly supported.
When computers and peripherals standardized on eight-bit bytes in the 1970s, it became obvious that computers and software could handle text that uses 256-character sets at almost no additional cost in programming, and no additional cost for storage. This would allow ASCII to be used unchanged and provide 128 more characters. Many manufacturers devised 8-bit character sets consisting of ASCII plus up to 128 of the unused codes. Since Eastern Europe were politically separated at the time, 8-bit encodings which covered all the more used European languages, such as Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and more could be made, often called "Latin" or "Roman".
128 additional characters is still not enough to cover all purposes, all languages, or even all European languages, so the emergence of many proprietary and national ASCII-derived 8-bit character sets was inevitable. Translating between these sets is complex ; and was often not done, producing mojibake. There were eventually attempts at cooperation or coordination by national and international standards bodies in the late 1990s, but manufacture proprietary sets remained the most popular by far, primarily because the standards excluded many popular characters.

Proprietary extensions

Various proprietary modifications and extensions of ASCII appeared on non-EBCDIC mainframe computers and minicomputers, especially in universities.
Hewlett-Packard started to add European characters to their extended 7-bit / 8-bit ASCII character set HP Roman Extension around 1978/1979 for use with their workstations, terminals and printers. This later evolved into the widely used regular 8-bit character sets HP Roman-8 and HP Roman-9.
Atari and Commodore home computers added many graphic symbols to their non-standard ASCII.
The TRS-80 character set for the TRS-80 home computer added 64 semigraphics characters that implemented low-resolution block graphics.
IBM introduced eight-bit extended ASCII codes on the original IBM PC and later produced variations for different languages and cultures. IBM called such character sets code pages and assigned numbers to both those they themselves invented as well as many invented and used by other manufacturers. Accordingly, character sets are very often indicated by their IBM code page number. In ASCII-compatible code pages, the lower 128 characters maintained their standard US-ASCII values, and different pages could be made available in the upper 128 characters. DOS computers built for the North American market, for example, used code page 437, which included accented characters needed for French, German, and a few other European languages, as well as some graphical line-drawing characters. The larger character set made it possible to create documents in a combination of languages such as English and French, but not, for example, in English and Greek.
Apple Computer introduced their own eight-bit extended ASCII codes in Mac OS, such as Mac OS Roman. The Apple LaserWriter also introduced the Postscript character set.
Digital Equipment Corporation developed the Multinational Character Set, which had fewer characters but more letter and diacritic combinations. It was supported by the VT220 and later DEC computer terminals. This later became the basis for other character sets such as the Lotus International Character Set, ECMA-94 and ISO 8859-1.

ISO 8859 and proprietary adaptations

Eventually, ISO released this standard as ISO 8859 describing its own set of eight-bit ASCII extensions. The most popular is ISO 8859-1, also called ISO Latin 1, which contained characters sufficient for the most common Western European languages.
Variations were standardized for other languages as well: ISO 8859-2 for Eastern European languages and ISO 8859-5 for Cyrillic languages, for example.
One notable way in which ISO character sets differ from code pages is that the character positions 128 to 159, corresponding to ASCII control characters with the high-order bit set, are specifically unused and undefined in the ISO standards, though they had often been used for printable characters in proprietary code pages, a breaking of ISO standards that was almost universal.
Microsoft later created code page 1252, a compatible superset of ISO 8859-1 with extra characters in the ISO unused range.
Code page 1252 is the standard character encoding of western European language versions of Microsoft Windows, including English versions.
ISO 8859-1 is the common 8-bit character encoding used by the X Window System, and most Internet standards used it before Unicode.

Character set confusion

The meaning of each extended code point can be different in every encoding. In order to correctly interpret and display text data that includes extended codes, hardware and software that reads or receives the text must use the specific extended ASCII encoding that applies to it. Applying the wrong encoding causes irrational substitution of many or all extended characters in the text.
Software can use a fixed encoding selection, or it can select from a palette of encodings by defaulting, checking the computer's nation and language settings, reading a declaration in the text, analyzing the text, asking the user, letting the user select or override, and/or defaulting to last selection. When text is transferred between computers that use different operating systems, software, and encodings, applying the wrong encoding can be commonplace.
Because the full English alphabet and the most-used characters in English are included in the seven-bit code points of ASCII, which are common to all encodings, English-language text is less damaged by interpreting it with the wrong encoding, but text in other languages can display as mojibake. Because many Internet standards use ISO 8859-1, and because Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system for personal computers today, unannounced use of ISO 8859-1 is quite commonplace, and may generally be assumed unless there are indications otherwise.
Many communications protocols, most importantly SMTP and HTTP, require the character encoding of content to be tagged with IANA-assigned character set identifiers.

Multi-byte character encodings

Some multi-byte character encodings are also true extended ASCII. That means all ASCII characters are encoded with a single byte with the same value as ASCII, and these values are not used anywhere else. They can be used in file formats where only ASCII bytes are used for keywords and file format syntax, while bytes 0x80-0xFF might be used for free text, including most programming languages, where language keywords, variable names, and function names must be in ASCII, but string constants and comments can use non-ASCII characters. This makes it much easier to introduce a multi-byte character set into existing systems that use extended ASCII.
UTF-8 is true extended ASCII, as are some Extended Unix Code encodings.
ISO/IEC 6937 is not extended ASCII because its code point 0x24 corresponds to the general currency sign rather than to the dollar sign, but otherwise is if you consider the accent+letter pairs to be an extended character followed by the ASCII one.
Shift JIS is not true extended ASCII. Besides replacing the backslash with the yen character, multi-byte characters can also include ASCII bytes. It does avoid the use of ASCII delimiters and controls, so in many cases such as HTML it can work. UTF-16 is even less extended ASCII because ASCII characters are stored as two bytes with one byte equal to 0x00. Porting an existing system to support character sets as Shift JIS or UTF-16 is complicated and bug prone.

Usage in computer-readable languages

For programming languages and document languages such as C and HTML, the principle of Extended ASCII is important, since it enables many different encodings and therefore many human languages to be supported with little extra programming effort in the software that interprets the computer-readable language files.
The principle of Extended ASCII means that: