CAN SOMEONE, IN VERY PLAIN ENGLISH, EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT ARE HEX CODES, AND WHAT ARE ASCII CODES. AND ARE ASCII CODES THE SAME AS 232 CODES.

I'm new at this and want to learn all about it.

Thanks for your help and patience.

Sincerely;
Steve Kovacs

Hi Steve,

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose. ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes.

Hexadecimal describes a base-16 number system. That is, it describes a numbering system containing 16 sequential numbers as base units (including 0) before adding a new position for the next number. The hexadecimal numbers are 0-9 and then use the letters A-F.

Hexadecimal is a convenient way to express binary numbers in modern computers in which a byte is almost always defined as containing eight binary digits. When showing the contents of computer storage (for example, when getting a core dump of storage in order to debug a new computer program or when expressing a string of text characters or a string of binary values in coding a program or HTML page), one hexadecimal digit can represent the arrangement of four binary digits. Two hexadecimal digits can represent eight binary digits, or a byte.

When people use RS-232 codes, this is just a protocol that someone designed. These protocols can utilize ASCII, HEX, and others, or even a combination of many types.

So your question about are the ASCII codes the same as the RS232 codes - they could be if the protocol you are working with uses ASCII characters.