ASCII


ASCII Table


Each character in the ASCII table can be represented in 7 bits. For example, the null terminator is represented as 000 0000

The leftmost 8th bit is reserved for Unicode, which will label it as a 0 if the character is within the ASCII table

ASCII reserves the first 32 characters (0-31) as control characters, which are characters not intended to represent printable information.

Control characters refer to things a computer must process, such as an alert, a tab, or a null terminator. All of the control characters begin with 000. For instance, a horizontal tab is represented as 000 1001

The Racket with Brackets

After diving down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I finally figured out what to call all of the punctuation used when coding. Brace yourselves (ha.)

Although by default, "bracket" refers to [these] brackets, every type of bracket has a name, and a descriptor, as shown in the table below:

Spoken Name Technical Name Character
Bracket Square bracket [ ]
Brace Curly bracket { }
Parenthesis Round bracket ( )
Chevron Angle bracket < >

Modifier Keys

The precedence of modifier keys

  1. fn

ANSI Colors

ANSI escape codes are a standard for in-band signaling to control the cursor location, color, and other options on text terminals. The ANSI x3.64 standard was released in 1979 and later updated by the 5th edition ECMA-48 standard in 1991, ISO/IEC 6429 in 1992, and ISO-8613-3 in 1995. ANSI escape codes are started using \e[ and contain numeric codes separated by semicolons. The escape code is terminated with an 'm'. ANSI Color Codes.

ANSI Color Escape Sequences

Code Effect Note
\x1b[ CSI Control Sequence Indicator
CSI n m ANSICOLOR ANSI color code (Select Graphic Rendition)
CSI 38 ; 5 ; n m 256COLOR Foreground 8-bit 256 color code
CSI 48 ; 5 ; n m 256COLOR Background 8-bit 256 color code
CSI 38 ; 2 ; r ; g ; b m TRUECOLOR Foreground 24-bit RGB color code
CSI 48 ; 2 ; r ; g ; b m TRUECOLOR Background 24-bit RGB color code

The 16 ANSI Colors

Color Code Hex Value Code Hex Value
Black 0 #000000 8 #555555
Red 1 #aa0000 9 #ff5555
Green 2 #00aa00 10 #55ff55
Yellow 3 #aaaa00 11 #ffff55
Blue 4 #0000aa 12 #5555ff
Magenta 5 #aa00aa 13 #ff55ff
Cyan 6 #00aaaa 14 #55ffff
White 7 #aaaaaa 15 #ffffff

The xterm 256 colors

In 1999, Thomas Dickey, an xterm maintainer, using a patch created by Todd Larason to add support for 256 colors. These colors form a compatible extension to the OG 16 ANSI colors and has been adopted by most terminal emulators, including the macOS Terminal application, which runs on xterm, as well as MUD clients.

To send a 256 color foreground color one must print \e[38;5;COLORm where COLOR is a number between 0 and 255.

For background colors, it's pretty much the same, but the escape sequence starts with 48, instead of 38. Therefore, one must print \e[48;5;COLORm where COLOR is a number between 0 and 255.

Name Code Dim Code Bold
Azure 025 0066bb 033 0088ff
Blue 019 0000bb 021 0000ff
Cyan 037 00bbbb 051 00ffff
Ebony 016 000000 059 666666
Green 034 00bb00 046 00ff00
Jade 035 00bb66 048 00ff88
Lime 070 66bb00 118 88ff00
Magenta 127 bb00bb 201 ff00ff
Orange 130 bb6600 208 ff8800
Pink 125 bb0066 198 ff0088
Red 124 bb0000 196 ff0000
Silver 102 888888 188 dddddd
Tan 094 886600 178 ddbb00
Violet 055 6600bb 093 8800ff
White 145 bbbbbb 231 ffffff
Yellow 142 bbbb00 226 ffff00

50 24 shades of gray

(Couldn't help it.) To display code 232 through 255 using 24 bit RGB colors the following hexadecimal values are suggested for the 24 shade grayscale: start out at 8 for the first color and increment the value by 10 for each increment. \x08, \x12, \x1C, \x26, etc.

Select Graphic Rendition (SGR)

SGR Color Codes are used to format output on terminals, as well as in many coding languages, such as java. An SGR color code can be expressed by typing the escape character 0x1b followed by [ then the code number (e.g. 42) and then the letter m. When you put that all together, it looks like \x1b[42m.The formatting will persist until the reset code is given, which is code #0. You can specify this with \x1b[0m

echo -e -n '\x1b[42m Green \x1b[0m\n'

Here are some of the most useful codes:

Font Style

Escape Code Function
\x1b[0m reset all fonts, formats, colors, etc.
\x1b[1m enable bold font
\x1b[2m enable faded font
\x1b[3m enable italic font
\x1b[4m enable underlined font
\x1b[5m enable blinking font
\x1b[7m enable inverted-font
\x1b[22m disable bold font
\x1b[23m disable italic font
\x1b[24m disable underlined font
\x1b[25m disable blinking font
\x1b[27m disable inverted-font

Foreground Color

Color Foreground Background
black \x1b[30m \x1b[40m
red \x1b[31m \x1b[41m
green \x1b[32m \x1b[42m
yellow \x1b[33m \x1b[43m
blue \x1b[34m \x1b[44m
magenta \x1b[35m \x1b[45m
cyan \x1b[36m \x1b[46m
white \x1b[37m \x1b[47m
select 256-color \x1b[38;5;<0-255> \x1b[48;5;<0-255>
default \x1b[39m \x1b[49m

The 256 colors of xterm

The first 16 colors have RGB tuples predetermined by ANSI that don't follow the same formula as the others

typeset -A rgb256

let index=0
# First two rows, colors [0..15]
for ((row = 0; row <= 1; row += 1)); do
    for ((blue = 0; blue <= 1; blue += 1)); do
        for ((green = 0; green <= 1; green += 1)); do
            for ((red = 0; red <= 1; red += 1)); do

            done
        done
    done
done
# Second row, colors [8..15]

predeter

XColorTable() {
  i=16
  for ((r = 0; r <= 255; r+=40)); do
    for ((g = 0; g <= 255; g+=40)); do
      for ((b = 0; b <= 255; b+=40)); do
        echo "Color$((i++)) = (${r}, ${g}, ${b})"
        if ((b == 0)); then
            b=55;
        fi
      done
      if ((b == 0)); then
        g=55;
      fi
    done
    if ((r == 0)); then
        r=55;
    fi
  done
  for ((m = 8; m <= 238; m+=10)); do # Do Monochrome
    echo "Color$((i++)) = (${m}, ${m}, ${m})"
  done
}

SGR Cursor Movements

Cursor/Screen Color

Escape Code Function
\Ec Reset screen to initial state

Modifying Content

Escape Code Function
\E[J / \E[0J Clear from cursor to end of screen
\E[1J Clear from cursor to beginning of stream
\E[2J Clear entire screen
\E[3J Clear entire screen and delete all lines saved in the scrollback buffer
\E[K / \E[0K Erase from cursor to end of line
\E[1K Erase start-of-line up until the cursor
\E[2K Erase the entire line
\E[2X Erase 2 characters (replaced with whitespace)
\E[2P Delete 2 characters (left-shift the text that follows)
\E[2M Delete 2 lines
\E[2@ Insert 2 spaces (right-shift the text that follows)
\E[2L Insert 2 lines (right-shift the text that follows)

Modify Screen

Escape Code Function
\E[2S Scroll up 2 lines
\E[2T Scroll down 2 lines

Cursor Movement

Escape Code Function
\E[2A Shift cursor up by 2 rows
\E[2B Shift cursor down 2 rows
\E[2C Shift cursor right 2 columns
\E[2D Shift cursor left 2 columns
\E[2E Shift cursor to the 1st column, 2 rows below
\E[2F Shift cursor to the 1st column, 2 rows above
\E[2G Move cursor to column 2 (current row)
\E[2d Move cursor to row 2 (current column)
\E[i;jH Move cursor to row i, column j

Misc.

Escape Code Function
\E[nb Repeat previous character n times
\E7 Save cursor position
\E8 Restore cursor position

Unicode

Unicode Transformation Format (UTF)

Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) is one of the mapping methods engineered to encode text. It does this by mapping code points to code values. Each code value is a unique sequence of bytes.

UTF-16

The UTF-16 encoding system, is not as simple as it's name suggests. Each char is not encoded with 16 bits, as is commonly assumed. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding format.

Java's char object is encoded using UTF-16 and so are Windows filenames, as well as the C++ RESTful API SDK written my Microsoft, as well as the macOS operating system.

It's rarely advantageous to use UTF-16 over UTF-8. The only time it will result in a smaller file size is if the majority of text in the file consists of Chinese or Japanese characters. Even so, if there is a large amount of whitespace (which is an ASCII character) then the UTF-8 encoding would still result in a smaller file size. The standard norm is increasingly becoming UTF-8, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.

UTF-32

UTF-32, unlike its brothers, is a fixed-width encoding format. Every character is guaranteed to be represented by exactly 4 bytes. UTF-32 is rarely used. Requiring every character to be represented with 4 bytes results in a significant increase in file size. It is slightly faster to read than UTF-8 but the difference is barely measurable.

Lastly, UTF-32 is problematic because it results in encoding many 8-bit strings of 0's. Traditional software interprets this as the null terminator, which signals the end of the string, which would truncate the remaining information previously encoded by UTF-32.