Extended ASCII or high ASCII character sets

What is Extended ASCII/High ASCII characters?

The term extended ASCII or high ASCII describes the eight-bit or larger character encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters as well as others.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a character encoding based on the English alphabet.

The use of the term extended ASCII or high ASCII is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted that the ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters.

Since ASCII is a seven-bit code and most computers manipulate data in eight-bit bytes, many extensions use the additional 128 codes available by using all eight bits of each byte.

This helps include many languages, such as, German, Swedish, Norweigian and Danish, otherwise not easily representable in standard ASCII. It is however not enough to cover all languages of countries in which computers are sold, so even these eight-bit extensions have local variants. Today there are few varying "extended" ASCII character sets.

To the standard/normal ASCII character table and the HTML Codes for special characters.