Alphanumeric Codes

Alphanumeric codes are a combination of alphabetical and numerical characters, and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits or a text constructed from this collection. Merriam-Webster suggests that the term “alphanumeric” may often additionally refer to other symbols, such as punctuation and mathematical symbols.

Alphanumeric codes are sometimes called character codes due to their certain properties. Now these codes are basically binary codes. We can write alphanumeric data, including data, letters of the alphabet, numbers, mathematical symbols and punctuation marks by this code which can be easily understandable and can be processed by the computers. Input output devices such as keyboards, monitors, mouse can be interfaced using these codes. 12-bit Hollerith code is the better known and perhaps the first effective code in the days of evolving computers in early days. During this period punch cards were used as the inputting and outputting data. But nowadays these codes are termed obsolete as many other modern codes have evolved. The most common alphanumeric codes used these days are ASCII code, EBCDIC code and Unicode.

Types of alphanumeric codes

ASCII Code

The full form of ASCII code is American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a seven bit code based on the English alphabet. In 1967 this code was first published and since then it is being modified and updated. ASCII code has 128 characters some of which are enlisted below to get familiar with the code.