What is ASCII?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard that assigns unique numeric values to different characters, including letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and control characters. ASCII was developed in the 1960s and has since become the most widely used character encoding scheme in computers and electronic devices. It allows computers to understand and represent text data using a standardized set of characters.

Understanding the ASCII Table

The ASCII table is a reference chart that maps the numeric values to their corresponding characters. It consists of 128 characters, represented by numbers ranging from 0 to 127. The first 32 characters are control characters, such as the newline and tab characters, while the remaining 96 characters are printable characters, including uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, and various symbols. Each character in the ASCII table has a unique decimal value, which can also be represented in hexadecimal and binary formats.

The ASCII Value of Numbers

In ASCII, the decimal values from 48 to 57 are assigned to the numbers 0 to 9, respectively. This means that the ASCII values of the digits directly correspond to their decimal representations. For example, the ASCII value of the number 0 is 48, the ASCII value of the number 1 is 49, and so on, up to the ASCII value of the number 9, which is 57. These values are useful when working with text data that includes numbers, as they allow computers to perform calculations and comparisons based on their numeric representations.

The ASCII Value of 8

The ASCII value of the number 8 is 56. This means that the character ‘8’ is represented by the decimal value 56 in the ASCII table. To help visualize this, here is a table showing the ASCII values for the numbers 0 to 9:

Character	Decimal Value
0	48
1	49
2	50
3	51
4	52
5	53
6	54
7	55
8	56
9	57

So, if you ever need to find the ASCII value of the number 8 or any other digit, you can simply refer to this table. Keep in mind that ASCII is just one of many character encoding schemes, and there are others, such as Unicode, that support a wider range of characters from different languages and scripts. However, for basic text manipulation and representation in computer systems, ASCII remains a fundamental and widely used standard.