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chrismorgan 3 days ago

I’m sure lots of people will think this, so I’ll say it—

Box-drawing characters (U+2500–U+257F) are not ASCII (U+0000–U+007F).

There, got it out of my system. :-)

(I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)

guidedlight 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

They sort of are.

I think the confusion arises because the IBM PC ASCII (code page 437) included comprehensive box-drawing characters between hexidecimal character positions B3 and DA. These weren't adopted into Unicode in the same character positions, but the box-drawing characters were definitely part of the commonly understood ASCII character set.

But I think that this ASCII tree editor should have a toggle option for basic vs extended ASCII, by utilising +, -, and | characters.

chrismorgan 2 days ago | parent [-]

ASCII is a 7-bit encoding. That’s it.

Honestly I’m not even convinced it’s entirely fair to call code page 437 a superset of ASCII, with how it repurposes the control codes 0x01–0x1F and 0x7F. (Superset of printable ASCII, definitely. It just feels not quite right to call it a superset of ASCII as a whole, though it is generally considered so.)

(And I can’t find any references to code page 437 being called “IBM PC ASCII”.)

Timwi 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed! I was disinclined to even look at this project because it said ASCII when the box-drawing characters are obviously a lot more suitable. It should say “text-only” or “plain-text” or similar instead.

Gormo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> (I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)

I recall "ASCII art" always referring to art made with the 7-bit character set, and art made with the extended CP437 characters (and including color, etc.) always being called "ANSI art".

novoreorx 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My understanding of ASCII was influenced by tools like ASCIIDraw and ASCIIFlow, which I used them like almost 10 years ago. Inside my mind there's a voice with the same opinion of yours, but I still quite used to call plain-text drawings as "ASCII". LOL