ASCII Table

ASCII World is a comprehensive reference for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and the broader family of character encoding systems that evolved from it. The site provides detailed lookup tables, conversion tools, programming guides, and educational content for developers, students, IT professionals, and anyone who works with text data at the byte level.

Complete ASCII Code Chart

The centerpiece of the site is a full ASCII table covering all 256 character codes. Each of the 128 standard characters and 128 extended characters has its own dedicated page with decimal, hexadecimal, octal, and binary values, along with the HTML entity, Unicode mapping, URL escape code, and usage notes. You can browse the table in five different layouts: detailed view with expandable rows, a hex map for quick scanning, a compact reference for printing, a visual browser for symbol discovery, and a high-level summary view. Character categories like letters, digits, punctuation, control characters, and whitespace each have their own filtered pages for focused reference.

Encoding Tables and Comparison

ASCII was just the beginning. The site documents ten major encoding standards that built on or diverged from the original 7-bit specification. Browse complete character maps for CP437 (the IBM PC encoding that gave DOS its box-drawing characters), Windows-1252 (the de facto standard for Western European text on Windows), ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), and seven additional ISO and Windows code pages. The encoding comparison tool places any two encodings side by side, highlighting every position where they assign different characters to the same byte value. A dedicated character sets reference and Windows code pages guide explain how these standards relate to each other and to Unicode.

Converter Tools

ASCII World includes over a dozen conversion tools that handle the formats developers encounter most often. The text to ASCII converter and ASCII to text decoder translate between readable text and decimal code sequences. Specialized converters handle hexadecimal, binary, and octal representations. A base converter translates between any two numeral bases up to 36. Additional tools cover Base64 encoding and decoding, URL percent-encoding, HTML entity encoding, ASCII to EBCDIC conversion for mainframe environments, and an ASCII art generator that renders text in decorative character fonts.

Articles and Learning Resources

The article library contains in-depth guides on character encoding topics. Technical tutorials cover ASCII in Python, JavaScript, Java, and SQL, with working code examples for each language. Conceptual articles explain how UTF-8 encodes text at the byte level, how to diagnose and fix mojibake (garbled text from encoding mismatches), and the evolution of character encoding from telegraph codes to Unicode. The history of the 1963 standard traces how a committee of engineers decided which symbols to include and which to leave out. The encoding glossary defines over 50 terms, from ASCII and UTF-8 to byte order mark and code point.

Additional References

Beyond ASCII codes, the site provides curated reference pages for related topics. The HTML symbols reference covers named entities for special characters. A complete HTML color table lists all 140 named CSS colors with hex values. The HTTP status codes reference documents every response code from 100 to 599. An ASCII keyboard guide maps every key on a standard keyboard to its character code. For creative projects, the ASCII art gallery showcases text emoticons, single-line art, and multi-line designs. A visual timeline traces the milestones in character encoding history, and a facts page collects the most interesting details from six decades of ASCII's influence on computing.

ASCII is a character encoding standard published in 1963 that maps 128 characters to numeric values between 0 and 127. Each number corresponds to a specific letter, digit, symbol, or control signal. For example, the capital letter "A" is ASCII code 65 (hex 41), the digit "0" is code 48 (hex 30), and a space is code 32 (hex 20).

The standard organizes its 128 codes into two groups. Codes 0 through 31 and code 127 are control characters - non-printable signals originally used to operate teletypes and printers. Codes 32 through 126 are printable characters that include 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, 10 digits, 32 punctuation marks, and the space character.

Although ASCII only covers English text and basic symbols, it became the foundation for virtually all modern encoding systems. UTF-8 - now used on over 98% of web pages - keeps the first 128 code points identical to ASCII, meaning any ASCII file is automatically valid UTF-8. Regional encodings like Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 extend the range to 256 values, adding accented letters and currency symbols while preserving the original 128 ASCII assignments.

Developers work with ASCII codes daily - from Python's ord() and chr() functions to JavaScript's charCodeAt() to SQL's ASCII() function. Understanding these values helps debug encoding errors, parse binary protocols, validate user input, and build text-processing tools.