Tag: Protocols

If you’ve haven’t read my last two columns (part I and part II) on UTF encodings, I’ll summarize them here in one sentence:

THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS ASCII!

That’s right, there is no such thing as an ASCII string unless you understand the encoding that it uses. And there are a lot of encodings. We all know a significant segment of the world’s population speaks, reads and writes something other than English. For your ASCII strings to be understood by people speaking languages other than English, you really need to understand ASCII encodings. It’s time to ante up.

In this edition of my dissertation on ASCII I am going to devolve into the background of Unicode. This is the second of two parts of my presentation on ASCII (part I here). ASCII data is something we encounter every single day but most of us don’t really appreciate the complexity behind it or what’s happening behind the scenes. If you think this isn’t important you’d be wrong. ASCII data moves a lot of important information on the factory floor and that’s the reason our ASCII to PLC Gateway is so popular. Our customers also move a lot of ASCII data over EtherNet/IP™ and ProfiNet IO. ASCII still rules though software programmers may not want to hear that.