What do ASCII codes 128-159 stand for?

[Lars Eighner]

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Kelly Jones wrote:

> "man ascii" defines the ASCII codes from 0-127,

That is all the ASCII codes there are.  ASCII is a a seven-bit standard.

> and the various ISO-8859-x tables define the ASCII codes from 160-255

No.  There is no such thing as ASCII codes from 160-255.  ASCII is a 7-bit
standard.  You cannot express 160 in seven bits.

> (depending on your character set), but are there standard representations
> for the ASCII codes between 128 and 159 inclusive?

No, because there are no ASCII codes between 128 and 159.  ASCII is a 7-bit
standard.

The S in ASCII stands for Standard.  So the ascii man page faithful
reproduces the standard which has some weird old teletypish names for
the character codes 0 to 31 (decimal).  For many purposed on Unix-like
systems these are known as control characters, being control-@ followed
by the alphabetic control characters A-Z, and the control characters [\]^

The character codes 128-159 are the control characters with the eighth bit
set.  There are lots of standards for character sets.  Many of them avoid
mapping to this range.  But there is nothing as nearly universal as ASCII,
which as I have mentioned, is a seven-bit standard.

-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266