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    8.4 Character Codes

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    Maxi Brad

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    8.4 Character Codes

    Uploaded by

    Maxi Brad
    7 views10 pages

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    7 views10 pages

    8.4 Character Codes

    Uploaded by

    Maxi Brad

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 10

    8.

    4 Character Codes
    Back to the real world

    Sometimes we need computers to convert numbers and data from


    binary form into a format which humans can use.

    Sometimes we need to represent more than just numbers.

    2
    Representing text: ASCII

    “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”


    • Allows representation of letters, numbers and control codes.
    • Only provides (truncated) anglicised Latin alphabet.

    • 7 bit representation, with the final bit reserved for parity checking.
    • Allows a simple error detection scheme:
    • Set to 1 if the sum of the 7 data bits is odd.
    • Set to 0 if the sum is even.

    3
    ASCII

    table 2.7 from Computer Organization & Architecture

    4
    Unicode

    A representation for the whole world.


    • Allows representation of all alphabets, many symbols and is extendable.
    • Capable of encoding 1,112,064 characters
    • UTF-8, using one to four bytes per character.
    • Allowing backwards compatibility.
    • As of March 2020 Unicode 13.0 has143,859 characters:
    • 143,696 graphic characters.
    • 163 format characters.
    • Covers:
    • 154 modern and historic scripts.
    • Multiple symbol sets.
    • Emoji.

    5
    Sound

    We can encode periodic audio signal samples as integers.


    40000 samples per second is sufficient for human hearing.

    6
    Images

    Reduce the picture to a grid of ‘picture elements’, or pixels.

    Encode pixel values as integers, such as:


    • Single bits for black and white.
    • 8-value grayscale (3-bit).
    • Triplets of 256 value red/green/blue (RGB) colour (24/32-bit).
    • …and much higher definitions.

    7
    Images

    Triplets of 256 value red/green/blue (RGB) colour.

    8
    To conclude

    We've seen a sample of data representations that are used in computers.


    • And some of the motivation behind them.

    Of course there are far more:


    • Image files, movie files, sound files and so on.

    And there are also compression techniques which can be applied to most of them in software.
    • But that's beyond our scope.

    Later on we’ll look at how to implement binary representations in hardware, using digital circuits.

    9
    Reading and References

    Outline primarily based upon:


    • Chapter 2, Computer Organization & Architecture (3rd Edition), Null & Lobur
    Suggested learning activities:
    • Find out which control codes were included in ASCII and why.
    • Try to figure out how much bigger a typical jpeg picture file would be if it was uncompressed.

    10

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