Question

How many bits are used to encode a character according to the ascii encoding scheme?.

Answer 1

All ASCII character sets have exactly 128 characters, thus only 7-bits are required to represent each character as an integer in the range 0 to 127 (0x00 to 0x7F). If additional bits are available (most systems use at least an 8-bit byte), all the high-order bits must be zeroed.