Alteryx Foundation Micro-Credential Practice Exam

What are two types of character sets recognized in the context of text encoding?

1. ASCII and ISO-8859

2. ASCII and Unicode

3. Unicode and UTF-8

4. ASCII and UTF-16

The correct answer is: ASCII and Unicode

The context of text encoding involves various character sets that define how text is represented and encoded in computers. The correct answer highlights two widely recognized character sets: ASCII and Unicode. ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is an early and fundamental character encoding standard that uses a 7-bit binary number to represent each character. It encompasses 128 characters, including control characters, digits, punctuation, and uppercase and lowercase letters. ASCII served as the groundwork for many other encodings. Unicode, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive character set that aims to include all characters from every writing system in use globally. It uses a unique code point for each character, which allows for over a million characters across various scripts, symbols, and emoji. Unicode has become essential in promoting compatibility and standardization in text representation across different platforms and languages. While other choices also contain valid encoding formats, the pairing of ASCII and Unicode reflects foundational and widely used text encoding standards. This understanding is crucial for anyone working with data, as it ensures proper handling and representation of text in diverse applications.