What is the difference between ASCII and Plain-Text in PHP?

ASCII is a character encoding standard that uses 7-bit binary numbers to represent characters. Plain text, on the other hand, refers to text that is not encoded or formatted in any specific way. In PHP, when working with strings, it is important to distinguish between ASCII and plain text to ensure that the correct encoding is used for processing the data.

// Convert plain text to ASCII in PHP
$plainText = "Hello, world!";
$asciiText = mb_convert_encoding($plainText, 'ASCII');

echo $asciiText;