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does ascii have one of the bits reserved for parity check? This part confuses me:

"Each ASCII character is 8 bits wide, or one byte. The result of this means that if each bit is either a 1 or a 0 that there are only 128 possible combinations of ASCII characters."

If all 8 bits are used for data there should be 255 possible combinations.

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I thought ASCII only used 7 bits for the basic set, which would be 128. The remaining 128 seems to be used for special or language specific characters, but varies somehow.

I'm uncertain, but you may be remembering 'code pages'.

From the site below, you can click different code pages to see the changes in extended ascii.

https://www.ascii-codes.com/

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