ASCII \ Unicode
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
A standard single-byte character encoding scheme used for text-based data. ASCII uses designated 7-bit or 8-bit number combinations to represent either 128 or 256 possible characters. Standard ASCII uses 7 bits to represent all uppercase and lowercase letters, the numbers 0 through 9, punctuation marks, and special control characters used in U.S. English.
Most current x86-based systems support the use of extended ASCII. Extended ASCII allows the eighth bit of each character to identify an additional 128 special symbol characters, foreign-language letters, and graphic symbols.Those 128 symbols are used to represent Greek, Cyrillic, or Arabic characters.
Unicode
A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium that represents almost all of the written languages of the world. The Unicode character repertoire has multiple representation forms, including UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. Most Windows interfaces use the UTF-16 form.A 16 bit code allows for about 65,000 different representations. This is enough to encode the popular Asian languages like Chinese, Korean or Japanese and all other languages.