I have several questions related about Extended ASCII codes:
1. Why are there two different key combinations to generate characters? For example, Alt-0162 and Alt-155 both generate the cents character,
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Extended ASCII codes
Home » Forums » AskWoody support » Windows » Windows – other » Extended ASCII codes
- This topic has 6 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 22 years, 11 months ago.
AuthorTopicWSklugherz
AskWoody LoungerJuly 18, 2002 at 12:05 pm #373773Viewing 1 reply threadAuthorReplies-
WSLeif
AskWoody LoungerJuly 18, 2002 at 12:21 pm #601935This page at cplusplus.com may answer some of your questions.
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WSBruce K
AskWoody Lounger -
WSLeif
AskWoody LoungerJuly 19, 2002 at 4:55 am #602137I presume you are referring to the requirement that the numeric keypad is used on a ‘standard’ keyboard?
I would expect this to be defined by the notebook manufacturer – did you?
(On mine I need to use a combination of and then use the keys with additional numbers on them : MJKLUIO789)
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WSBruce K
AskWoody LoungerJuly 19, 2002 at 6:03 am #602144 -
WSWyllyWylly
AskWoody Lounger
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WSHansV
AskWoody LoungerJuly 18, 2002 at 12:41 pm #601937In addition to the link provided by Leif:
Alt+nnn results in extended ASCII characters, used in MS-DOS.
Alt+0nnn results in ANSI characters, used in Windows.Standard keyboards have keys for most characters with ASCII (or ANSI) code below 128. There is no difference between ASCII and ANSI in this range.
In the days of MS-DOS, to type other characters, you had to resort to Alt+numeric codes to type characters with an (extended) ASCII code above 128. Some programs had workarounds, but they were different from program to program. As a legacy, Alt+nnn still produces these extendend ASCII characters.
Before word processing programs could do graphics, the only way to get lines, borders etc. into your document was to create them from characters. The extended ASCII characters in the range 176-223 (Hex B0 – DF) are meant for this.
╔══╗
╚══╝
With the advent of graphics, there was less need for these characters, so it was decided to have more international characters in the ANSI set, such as capitals with diacritics.
Nowadays, in Unicode, the character set is much larger then 0…255.
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