Today, the encoding scheme named unicode has arisen to take over for ascii for many applications.
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.The Unicode standard defines UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, and several other encodings are in use.
UTF-8 is the most widely used. This enciding standard is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units.