Ccaps Blog

In this post, we will talk about the challenges related to capitalization. For this, we need to explain how letters and numbers were represented in the early eras of personal computing.

In the past most computers “spoke” English, with each character of a certain language related to a number in a character table. In this type of representation, only 128 codes were necessary to map all used characters, as you can see below.

Upper Case Letters (A – Z)                      26
Lower Case Letters (a – z)                        26
Digits (0 – 9)                                               10
Punctuation Marks (. , + { [ ) % $)           32
Space                                                            01
Control Characters (TAB, CR, LF etc.)    33
Total                                                           128

The ASCII Chart

As 7 bits are necessary to represent the 128 existing positions (27=128), a 7-bit coding was created and called “ASCII”, the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

I suggest you read the article on ASCII on Wikipedia. It will serve as a useful reference for the most part of the next post.

See you then!

Related posts:

1. Internationalization Part 4 – Capitalization II
2. Internationalization Part 8 – Fonts
3. Internationalization Part 5 – Addresses
4. Internationalization Part 7 – Date Format
5. Internationalization Part 6 – Formatting of Financial Symbols

Posted in 04/13/2009 at 6.47 pm.
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