ASCII protocol

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ASCII code, displayable ASCII characters in white fields

ASCII protocols are called network protocols that communicate exclusively using human-readable words or at least exclusively using human-readable characters from the ASCII character set (line breaks are permitted as the only control characters).

The advantage of this form of communication is that such protocols do not require a communication program specially developed for the protocol, but can be used directly (for example with the help of a Telnet program ). The disadvantage is that the amount of data to be transmitted can be much larger than with conventional network protocols .

Examples of ASCII protocols are POP3 , SMTP , HTTP , FTP and IRC .