Alphanumeric
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alphanumeric is a collective term used to identify letters of the Latin alphabet and Arabic digits. There are either 36 (single case) or 62 (case-sensitive) alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to 9 and letters A to Z.
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[edit] Computing
In computing terminology, a character stored in alphanumeric form is considerably smaller than storing a 8-bit ASCII character, as each character is only 6 bits in length.
There is no standard for storing 6-bit alphanumeric data. A 6-bit field has 64 possible values, so if only 36 are used in single case, there is room for another 28 characters (usually slashes and other punctuation), making alphanumeric data useful for storing text and website addresses.
Alphanumeric data can be stored even more compactly in computer systems if the storage medium is calculated in base 36, where each numerical position represents a character. Storing characters in base 36 and base 64 (6 bits per character) is more memory efficient for storing text-only data than base 256 (using 8 bits, or a byte, for each character).
[edit] Other references
In the TV show ReBoot, "alphanumeric" was an interjection used by Enzo as an equivalent of "cool!" or "awesome!" In the episode "Talent Night", it was used to mean "everything is all right."
