Difference Between ASCII and EBCDIC

 

Difference Between ASCII and EBCDIC

Definition

ASCII is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. EBCDIC is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems.

Stands for

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. EBCDIC stands for Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code.

Number of bits Represent a Character

Further, ASCII uses 7 bits to represent a character. EBCDIC uses 8 bits to represent a character.

Number of Characters

Also, ASCII represents 128 (2⁷) characters while EBCDIC represents 256 (2⁸) characters.

Efficiency

Moreover, the same character in ASCII requires 7 bits, but EBCDIC required 8 bits. Therefore, ASCII is more efficient than EBCDIC.

Character Order

Besides, ASCII arranges the characters in consecutive order. EBCDIC groups 9 characters at a time.

Compatibility

Additionally, ASCII is compatible with modern encodings such as Unicode. It is possible to open ASCII files with Unicode. On the other hand, EBCDIC is not compatible with modern encodings such as Unicode.

Conclusion

ASCII and EBCDIC are two character encoding standards. The main difference between ASCII and EBCDIC is that the ASCII uses seven bits to represent a character while the EBCDIC uses eight bits to represent a character.

ASCII & EBCDIC

ASCII  

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an encoding standard that represents digits, letters, and symbols using numbers. The digits can be 1, 2, 3, etc. while the letters are a, b, c, A, B, C, etc. The symbols are characters like !, $, and #. Therefore, it is possible to convert any piece of text to the corresponding set of numbers using ASCII. This conversion makes it easier to store them in the computer memory. 

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common character encoding format for text data in computers and on the internet. In standard ASCII-encoded data, there are unique values for 128 alphabetic, numeric or special additional characters and control codes.

ASCII encoding is based on character encoding used for telegraph data. The American National Standards Institute first published it as a standard for computing in 1963.

 

EBCDIC

EBCDIC stands for Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. It is mainly used on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It is also supported by some platforms other than IBM. EBCDIC uses 8 bits to represent a single character, and it represents a 256 (2⁸) alphanumeric and special characters. There are several disadvantages to EBCDIC. When compared to ASCII, the same character which takes 7 bits to represent in ASCII will take 8 bits in EBCDIC. Therefore, EBCDIC is less efficient than ASCII.