# ASCII vs. Unicode: 4 Key Differences You Must Know  ## Metadata - Author: [[Spiceworks]] - Full Title: ASCII vs. Unicode: 4 Key Differences You Must Know - Category: #articles - Summary: ASCII is a character encoding standard that represents up to 256 English characters using 7 or 8 bits. In contrast, Unicode is a universal standard that supports over 149,000 characters from many languages and uses variable-length encoding. While ASCII is limited to English text, Unicode allows for a much broader range of characters and is widely used in modern computing. - URL: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/articles/ascii-vs-unicode/ ## Highlights - ASCII is a proper subset of Unicode, which means that Unicode includes all the characters that can be encoded in ASCII, plus many more. So, while ASCII is useful for representing characters in the English language, Unicode is capable of representing a much wider range of characters in other languages and scripts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtnvz7gd1zh8b7fcqnchsa5n))