American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII specifies the numerical encoding and meaning of 128 symbols, 95 printable characters and 33 control characters. The first letter of ASCII stands for American, so there's no use complaining that the printable characters don't include various accented letters or non-English characters.
(For those extra characters, you need another character set. Luckily there's many that do the job very nicely, like ISO 8859-1 for western european languages, which are also proper supersets of the ASCII set.)
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