ASCII Table - Character Codes Reference

Look up any printable ASCII character (codes 32 through 126) in decimal, hexadecimal, and 8-bit binary. Use the filter to search by character or decimal value.

Printable ASCII lookup table

Character Decimal Hex Binary (8-bit)

What is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding that maps letters, digits, punctuation, and control signals to numeric codes. Work on ASCII began in the 1960s; it became the dominant way for computers and teletype equipment to exchange English-focused text.

The classic standard is 7-bit ASCII: seven bits give 128 distinct codes (0–127). That includes non-printing control characters (0–31 and 127), the space character (32), and visible symbols and letters (33–126). Many systems store ASCII in a full byte and leave the top bit as 0 for compatibility.

ASCII vs Unicode

Unicode is a universal character set that includes every ASCII character at the same code points: U+0000 through U+007F match ASCII 0–127. So ASCII is a subset of Unicode.

UTF-8, the most common Unicode encoding on the web, is backward compatible with ASCII: bytes for pure ASCII text are identical to ASCII (one byte per character, high bit zero). Additional Unicode characters use multiple bytes. That is why legacy ASCII tools and UTF-8 pipelines often work together without re-encoding English text.

Control characters (0–31)

Codes 0 through 31 are control characters. They were designed for hardware terminals, printers, and serial links—not for display as glyphs. Examples include null (0, string terminator in C), horizontal tab (9), line feed (10), carriage return (13), and escape (27). Code 127 (DEL) is also a control code, historically used to punch out errors on paper tape.

This page lists only printable ASCII (32–126). For binary practice with letters and digits, try our text-to-binary tool after you understand how to read binary.

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