ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices.
It was designed in the early ’60s, as a standard character set for computers and electronic devices. ASCII is a 7-bit character set containing 128 characters. It contains the numbers from 0-9, the upper and lower case English letters from A to Z, and some special characters. This is generally created by a text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad.
An ASCII file is a binary file that stores ASCII codes, so it generally creates a bigger file size than that of a binary file. For example, suppose you wanted to write the number 100000. If you type it in ASCII, this would take 6 characters (which is 6 bytes). However, if you represent it as unsigned binary, you can write it out using 4 bytes.
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