How many numerical values do ASCII characters represent?

The accurate understanding of ASCII character representation states that ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, uses 7 bits to represent characters. This means it can represent 128 distinct characters, ranging from 0 to 127. Each character corresponds to a unique numerical value within this range.

In detail, the first 32 codes (0-31) are non-printable control characters, and the subsequent codes (32-126) represent printable characters, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and special symbols. The value 127 represents the "delete" control character.

While other options suggest wider ranges, they do not align with the standard ASCII character set representation, which fundamentally relies on 7-bit encoding. The relevance of this information is significant for various programming tasks and understanding how text is processed at a binary level in computing.