ASCII Converter
Convert text to ASCII codes and back, or convert between ASCII, decimal, hex, and binary.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ASCII?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard that assigns numeric codes to 128 characters including letters (A=65, a=97), digits (0=48), punctuation, and control characters. Originally developed in the 1960s for teletype machines, ASCII became the foundation for modern text encoding. While extended standards like Unicode now support thousands of characters from all world languages, ASCII remains a subset that all modern systems support and use as a baseline.
What is the ASCII value of common characters?
Common ASCII values include: Space = 32, numbers 0–9 = 48–57, uppercase A–Z = 65–90, lowercase a–z = 97–122. Control characters occupy values 0–31 (e.g., Tab = 9, Newline = 10). The letters A and a differ by exactly 32 — a property programmers exploit to toggle case by adding or subtracting 32. Knowing these values helps with programming tasks involving character manipulation, string sorting, and low-level data processing in C, Python, and other languages.
How is ASCII different from Unicode?
ASCII is limited to 128 characters and was designed primarily for English text. Unicode is a vastly larger standard supporting over 140,000 characters covering virtually all human writing systems, symbols, and emoji. UTF-8, the most common encoding on the web, is backward compatible with ASCII — the first 128 Unicode code points match ASCII exactly. Unicode allows a single document to contain English, Chinese, Arabic, mathematical symbols, and emoji simultaneously, making it essential for global software and internet communication.