According to the ASCII encoding scheme, each character is encoded using 7 bits. ASCII defines 128 characters, with code points ranging from 0 to 127, which can be represented with 7 bits. Although in many modern systems ASCII characters are stored in 8-bit bytes (one byte per character) with the most significant bit often set to zero or used as a parity bit, the original and standard ASCII encoding uses 7 bits per character.
Additional Context
- The 7-bit ASCII encoding covers basic English letters (uppercase and lowercase), digits, punctuation marks, and some control characters.
- Extended ASCII extends this to 8 bits (256 characters) to include additional symbols and characters for other languages, but this is beyond the original ASCII standard.
- In practice, computers typically use 8 bits to store ASCII characters for convenience, but the official encoding scheme itself is 7-bit.
Thus, the direct answer is: 7 bits.
