ASCII Table

What Is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding. It assigns the numbers 0 through 127 to control codes, spaces, punctuation, digits, uppercase and lowercase letters, and a small set of symbols.

Use the table above as the primary reference: search by character, decimal value, hexadecimal value, binary byte, or description. The binary column is shown as 8 bits for readability, with a leading zero because standard ASCII itself only needs 7 bits.

ASCII Decimal, Hex, and Binary

The same ASCII character can be written in several number systems. For uppercase A, all of these values identify the same code point:

• Decimal: 65
• Hexadecimal: 41 (commonly written 0x41)
• Binary: 01000001
• Character: A

That one-to-one mapping is why an ASCII decimal table, ASCII hex table, and ASCII binary table can all be combined into one reference instead of separate pages.

For an A-Z-only lookup, use the Binary Alphabet reference. If you need to convert complete text rather than look up individual codes, use the Text to Binary converter. For numeric conversions, use Decimal to Binary or Binary to Hex.

Control Characters vs Printable Characters

ASCII values 0-31 and 127 are control characters. They were designed to control terminals, printers, data streams, and communication equipment rather than display a visible glyph. Several are still important today: TAB inserts a horizontal tab, LF is line feed, CR is carriage return, and ESC is escape.

Values 32-126 are the printable part of standard ASCII. Space (32) is whitespace; values 33-126 include punctuation, digits, letters, and symbols.

ASCII vs Unicode and UTF-8

ASCII is small by modern standards: 128 values cannot represent most of the world’s writing systems. Unicode defines a much larger character set, while UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding for Unicode.

The important compatibility rule is that UTF-8 preserves standard ASCII exactly for values 0-127. For example, ASCII A is decimal 65 and byte 01000001; UTF-8 encodes that same character with the same byte. Characters outside ASCII use additional UTF-8 byte sequences.

For a deeper comparison, see ASCII vs Unicode vs UTF-8.

Extended ASCII Is Not One Standard

“Extended ASCII” often refers to 8-bit encodings that reuse ASCII for 0-127 and assign additional characters to 128-255. There is no single universal extended ASCII table: Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, DOS code pages, and other encodings assign some of those higher values differently.

When a value is above 127, identify the actual character encoding before treating it as an ASCII character. The table on this page intentionally stops at 127 because that is the complete standard ASCII range.