Character Code

[Don MI]

Thanks, Don,

What I meant by getting something different with Alt+155 is that someone
sent me a smiley face in an e-mail and she said she did it doing Alt+155,
whereas what I get is, as you say, the cents symbol. Also she sent musical
notes using Alt+154, but doing that I get Ü. My original question was how I
could put musical notes in an e-mail. Might a Mac have a different
arrangement? She was writing from a school where she works, and it's
possible the school might have Macs, I haven't had a chance to ask her yet.

Sorry, I do not know what Mac does.

Don

 

[Gary Smith]

ASCII is an acronym referring to a standard established by a technical group
recognized by the National Bureau of Standards as authorized to produce
standards. A number of such engineering groups are so recognized. I think,
but at this time are not sure, that ASC refers to the American Society of
Computer Engineers. ASCII is a standard that relates numbers, characters
and symbols to specific code. For example the number 155 relates to the
cents symbol and the number 0155 relates to the > symbol.

The ASCII standard defines characters only for values 0 through 127.
Anything above 127 is the province of some extended character set
definition, of which there are thousands. Microsoft refers to these
various character sets as code pages. The default code page used by
Windows is CP1252, commonly but erroneously known as "ANSI". It's
standard only within Windows.

As a standards, the code ALT-155 should always correspond to the cents
symbol. As far as I know all fonts that have ASCII code assigned to
numbers, characters and symbols follow the ASCII standard. While all
numbers, characters have assigned ASCII code numbers not all symbols have
ASCII code numbers. If you look at various symbols in Character Map some
will have only unicode assigned.

This is true only of Microsoft code pages, and is dependent on the font as
well. Character sets which conform to the ISO character set standards
reserve the values 128-159 for control characters and never assign graphic
symbols to those values. Macs and other non-Microsoft will have no
characters, or completely different characters, in that range. How
Alt-155 appears is entirely dependent on the receiver's system and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with what the sender intended. That's one
reason why basic internet functions such as email and especially
newsgroups are expected to be ASCII-only plain text.

 

[Gary Smith]

What I meant by getting something different with Alt+155 is that someone
sent me a smiley face in an e-mail and she said she did it doing Alt+155,
whereas what I get is, as you say, the cents symbol. Also she sent musical
notes using Alt+154, but doing that I get ?. My original question was how I
could put musical notes in an e-mail. Might a Mac have a different
arrangement? She was writing from a school where she works, and it's
possible the school might have Macs, I haven't had a chance to ask her yet.

Macs do have a completely different character set -- in fact they have a
bunch of them -- but I don't think that Alt-155 will give you a smiley
face in any of them. It's posssible that your correspondent may be using
some special application that remaps keyboard combinations for its own
purposes.