Alteryx Foundation Micro-Credential Practice Exam

Which character set should be used if the data only contains Latin Alphabet characters?

1. UTF-8

2. Latin-1

3. ASCII

4. Unicode

The correct answer is: ASCII

The use of ASCII is especially appropriate when the data is limited to Latin alphabet characters because ASCII was specifically designed to encode the English alphabet and a limited set of control characters, making it a perfect fit for datasets that do not require any additional characters beyond the basic Latin letters and digits. Since ASCII uses 7 bits for each character, it can represent a total of 128 characters, which includes the standard upper and lower case letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers from 0 to 9, and some special symbols and control codes. This efficiency makes ASCII an ideal choice for text data that is straightforward and does not need to accommodate special characters beyond the Latin script. In contrast, while options like UTF-8, Latin-1, and Unicode can also handle Latin alphabet characters, they are generally designed for broader use cases that include extended character sets, which may introduce unnecessary complexity and file size for datasets that do not require these additional characters. UTF-8 supports all Unicode characters and is more versatile, while Latin-1 can handle Western European languages but includes a wider range than necessary for simple Latin alphabet data. Unicode encompasses an extensive range of characters from multiple languages and scripts beyond the Latin alphabet, making it more complex than needed in this context.