ASCII Table: Complete Character Reference for Developers

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the foundational character encoding standard in computing. Understanding ASCII is essential for working with text processing, network protocols, and low-level programming.

What Is ASCII?

ASCII assigns numeric values to 128 characters, including letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters. It uses 7 bits, with values ranging from 0 to 127.

Printable ASCII Characters (32-126)

Dec	Hex	Char	Dec	Hex	Char	Dec	Hex	Char
32	20	(space)	65	41	A	97	61	a
33	21	!	66	42	B	98	62	b
48	30	0	67	43	C	99	63	c
49	31	1	90	5A	Z	122	7A	z

Important Control Characters

Dec	Hex	Abbr	Description
0	00	NUL	Null character
9	09	TAB	Horizontal tab
10	0A	LF	Line feed (newline)
13	0D	CR	Carriage return
27	1B	ESC	Escape
32	20	SP	Space
127	7F	DEL	Delete

Key Ranges

Range	Description
0-31	Control characters
32-47	Punctuation and symbols
48-57	Digits 0-9
65-90	Uppercase A-Z
97-122	Lowercase a-z

Common Programming Uses

Character conversion: Convert between uppercase and lowercase by adding/subtracting 32

Input validation: Check if a character is a digit (48-57), letter (65-90, 97-122), or special character

String sorting: ASCII values determine default sort order

Network protocols: HTTP, SMTP, and FTP use ASCII for commands

ASCII vs Unicode

ASCII covers 128 characters (English-centric). Unicode extends this to over 149,000 characters across all writing systems. UTF-8, the most common Unicode encoding, is backward-compatible with ASCII — the first 128 UTF-8 characters are identical to ASCII.

Try It Yourself

Browse the complete ASCII table with our interactive ASCII Table. Search, filter, and copy character codes instantly.