American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII Character Set



A char variable in C++ is a one-byte memory location where a single character value can be stored. Because one byte can hold values between 0 and 255 that means there are up to 256 different characters in the ASCII character set. These are usually broken down into two groups. The first, with values from 0 to 127 are considered the "Standard" ASCII character set. Characters with values from 128 to 255 are the "Extended" character set.


The ASCII Character Set


To actually display most of the extended character set you must use an escape character in a string to create that character. The escape character is "\xnnn". Where nnn is the hexidecimal value for the character.


The Extended ASCII Character Set