ASCII Table Online

ASCIITable.xyz is a single place where you can find everything about ASCII, ASCII character set, ASCII table, ASCII chart, Extended ASCII table, Windows 1252 charset, ISO-8859 charset etc.

The website lists down all the characters in the ASCII charset along with their decimal, binary, octal, and hex equivalent. It also contains descriptions for all the ASCII characters.

In this website, you’ll also find several tutorials and articles about How to convert decimal to ASCII and vice versa in various programming languages.

What is ASCII?

ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Exchange. It is a character encoding standard which was developed in the early days of computers for representing and exchanging arbitrary text-based information.

Computers can only understand numbers. Therefore, we need a way to encode characters to numeric form. ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into 7-bit integers so that they can be represented and exchanged easily.

The ASCII character set contains uppercase and lowercase alphabets A-Za-z, numbers from 0-9, some special characters like {'{}[]@$!'}<>, and some non-printable control characters like newline (\n), backspace (\b), horizontal tab (\t), vertical tab (\v) etc.

The above table lists all the 128 ASCII characters and their equivalent encoding in decimal, hex, octal, and binary form.

ASCII Table

The ASCII table is a collection of all the 128 characters of the ASCII character set.

The ASCII table can be classified into four sections -

• Control characters: The characters ranging from 0 to 31 and 127 are device control characters. These characters are unprintable.

• Lower and upper case alphabets: The uppercase alphabets (A-Z) range from 65 to 90 in the ASCII table. Lowercase alphabets (a-z) start from 97 and end at 122.

• Digits: The digits (0-9) range from 48 to 57 in the ASCII character set.

• Special characters: The rest of the characters in the ASCII charset are special characters like !, $, @, { } etc.

ASCII Character Order

The ordering of ASCII characters symbols follows a specific organization known as ASCIIbetical. It is different from the standard Alphabetical order.

In the ASCIIbetical order, the uppercase letters come before the lowercase letters (for example, Z comes before a). Also, digits and many punctuation symbols come before letters.

ASCII control characters (unprintable characters)

The ASCII character set uses the first 32 codes for control characters. The last code 127 that corresponds to Delete (DEL) i These control characters are intended to be used as commands to control devices (such as printers) that make use of ASCII, or to provide additional metadata data streams such as the ones stored on magnetic tapes.

For example, the ASCII code 10 represents the “line feed” (LF) function which is used as a command for the printer to advance its paper. Similarly, the ASCII code 8 represents Backspace.

There are other commonly used control characters like Horizontal tab, Vertical tab, Escape, etc.

ASCII printable characters

Out of 128 code points in ASCII character set, only 95 are printable characters. These characters range from 32 to 126. These printable characters are letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few other symbols as outlined in the above ASCII table.

The ASCII code 32 is for space character. The space character is not recognized as a printable symbol. It is also not a control character. The space character (32) is categorized as an invisible graphic symbol.

ASCII vs Unicode

ASCII is a 7-bit character set which is limited to only 128 characters. Unicode has a much wider range of characters in its character set. Their are multiple encoding formats of different sizes used in the Unicode character set like UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32.

ASCII character set is incorporated into the Unicode character set as the first 128 symbols. So Unicode character set is a superset of ASCII character set.

ASCII vs Extended ASCII Character set

Extended ASCII character set, as the name suggests is an extension of the ASCII character set. Extended ASCII uses 8 bits and it has 256 characters. The first 128 characters of the Extended ASCII character set are same as the ASCII character set. The next 128 characters are used to represent several special characters and symbols.

You can check out the full Extended ASCII table.

ASCII Table downloadable image

You can download the following image to refer to the ASCII table any time from your computer. Just right click on the following image and click “Save Image As…” to save it locally.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What ASCII means?

ASCII means American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard developed for digital communication.

Why ASCII is a 7-bit code?

The work on ASCII began in 1961 and the committe decided to use a 7-bit code for ASCII. 7-bit allows 128 characters and it could represent all American english characters and symbols. Moreover, 7 bits also meant minimuized cost while transmitting the data as opposed to 8-bits or 16-bits. The first edition of ASCII standard was published in 1963.

Should I use UTF-8 or ASCII?

UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII character set. This means that UTF-8 already contains all the ASCII characters as part of its character set. So you should use UTF-8 if the tool or program that you’re using supports it.