ASCII

A character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. Strictly ASCII only defines the first 127 characters, however most modern implementations have expanded the set to at least 255 characters.

Many modern systems have widely adopted the Unicode character set, the first 128 characters of which were selected to be compatible with the ASCII standard.

It is common for software to order lists using the ASCII character codes, rather than alphabetical order. This can cause some difficulties to non-technical users for example when lower case elements are sorted separately from upper case ones, when non-alphanumeric characters are placed in unexpected locations and when numbers are sorted by ASCII Order (for example "1", "12" and "4").

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The following pages link to here: Alphabetical, Alphanumeric, Encoding, Unicode