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ASCII table

All 128 ASCII characters with their codes in decimal, hex, binary and octal, and the HTML entity for each printable one. Control characters are listed by their abbreviation and name. Search for a character, a code or a name, and select a row to see its bits. Codes 128 to 255 are in extended ASCII below.

Showing all 128 codes.

Dec Hex Binary Oct Char HTML Name
0 00 0000000 000 null
1 01 0000001 001 start of heading
2 02 0000010 002 start of text
3 03 0000011 003 end of text
4 04 0000100 004 end of transmission
5 05 0000101 005 enquiry
6 06 0000110 006 acknowledge
7 07 0000111 007 bell
8 08 0001000 010 backspace
9 09 0001001 011 	 horizontal tab
10 0A 0001010 012 
 line feed
11 0B 0001011 013 vertical tab
12 0C 0001100 014 form feed
13 0D 0001101 015 carriage return
14 0E 0001110 016 shift out
15 0F 0001111 017 shift in
16 10 0010000 020 data link escape
17 11 0010001 021 device control 1
18 12 0010010 022 device control 2
19 13 0010011 023 device control 3
20 14 0010100 024 device control 4
21 15 0010101 025 negative acknowledge
22 16 0010110 026 synchronous idle
23 17 0010111 027 end of transmission block
24 18 0011000 030 cancel
25 19 0011001 031 end of medium
26 1A 0011010 032 substitute
27 1B 0011011 033 escape
28 1C 0011100 034 file separator
29 1D 0011101 035 group separator
30 1E 0011110 036 record separator
31 1F 0011111 037 unit separator
32 20 0100000 040   space
33 21 0100001 041 !! exclamation mark
34 22 0100010 042 "" double quotation mark
35 23 0100011 043 ## number sign, hash
36 24 0100100 044 $$ dollar sign
37 25 0100101 045 %% percent sign
38 26 0100110 046 && ampersand
39 27 0100111 047 '' apostrophe, single quote
40 28 0101000 050 (( left parenthesis
41 29 0101001 051 )) right parenthesis
42 2A 0101010 052 ** asterisk
43 2B 0101011 053 ++ plus sign
44 2C 0101100 054 ,, comma
45 2D 0101101 055 - hyphen, minus
46 2E 0101110 056 .. full stop, period
47 2F 0101111 057 // slash
48 30 0110000 060 0 digit 0
49 31 0110001 061 1 digit 1
50 32 0110010 062 2 digit 2
51 33 0110011 063 3 digit 3
52 34 0110100 064 4 digit 4
53 35 0110101 065 5 digit 5
54 36 0110110 066 6 digit 6
55 37 0110111 067 7 digit 7
56 38 0111000 070 8 digit 8
57 39 0111001 071 9 digit 9
58 3A 0111010 072 :: colon
59 3B 0111011 073 &#59;; semicolon
60 3C 0111100 074 << less-than sign
61 3D 0111101 075 == equals sign
62 3E 0111110 076 >> greater-than sign
63 3F 0111111 077 ?? question mark
64 40 1000000 100 @@ at sign
65 41 1000001 101 A capital A
66 42 1000010 102 B capital B
67 43 1000011 103 C capital C
68 44 1000100 104 D capital D
69 45 1000101 105 E capital E
70 46 1000110 106 F capital F
71 47 1000111 107 G capital G
72 48 1001000 110 H capital H
73 49 1001001 111 I capital I
74 4A 1001010 112 J capital J
75 4B 1001011 113 K capital K
76 4C 1001100 114 L capital L
77 4D 1001101 115 M capital M
78 4E 1001110 116 N capital N
79 4F 1001111 117 O capital O
80 50 1010000 120 P capital P
81 51 1010001 121 Q capital Q
82 52 1010010 122 R capital R
83 53 1010011 123 S capital S
84 54 1010100 124 T capital T
85 55 1010101 125 U capital U
86 56 1010110 126 V capital V
87 57 1010111 127 W capital W
88 58 1011000 130 X capital X
89 59 1011001 131 Y capital Y
90 5A 1011010 132 Z capital Z
91 5B 1011011 133 [[ left square bracket
92 5C 1011100 134 \\ backslash
93 5D 1011101 135 ]] right square bracket
94 5E 1011110 136 ^^ caret, circumflex
95 5F 1011111 137 __ underscore
96 60 1100000 140 `` grave accent, backtick
97 61 1100001 141 a small a
98 62 1100010 142 b small b
99 63 1100011 143 c small c
100 64 1100100 144 d small d
101 65 1100101 145 e small e
102 66 1100110 146 f small f
103 67 1100111 147 g small g
104 68 1101000 150 h small h
105 69 1101001 151 i small i
106 6A 1101010 152 j small j
107 6B 1101011 153 k small k
108 6C 1101100 154 l small l
109 6D 1101101 155 m small m
110 6E 1101110 156 n small n
111 6F 1101111 157 o small o
112 70 1110000 160 p small p
113 71 1110001 161 q small q
114 72 1110010 162 r small r
115 73 1110011 163 s small s
116 74 1110100 164 t small t
117 75 1110101 165 u small u
118 76 1110110 166 v small v
119 77 1110111 167 w small w
120 78 1111000 170 x small x
121 79 1111001 171 y small y
122 7A 1111010 172 z small z
123 7B 1111011 173 {{ left curly brace
124 7C 1111100 174 || vertical bar, pipe
125 7D 1111101 175 }} right curly brace
126 7E 1111110 176 ~ tilde
127 7F 1111111 177 delete

Binary is shown in the 7 bits ASCII uses; stored in a byte it has an extra 0 in front. The HTML column gives the numeric reference, which works for any character, and the named one where HTML has it (30 of the printable characters). Only & < > " ' also work in XML. To turn a whole message into binary, use the binary translator.

What ASCII is

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, was published in 1963 so that teleprinters and computers from different makers could exchange text. It gives a number from 0 to 127 to each of the English letters in both cases, the ten digits, punctuation, the space and 33 control codes that tell a device what to do rather than what to print. 128 codes fit exactly in 7 bits.

A code like this is what turns bits into text: the byte 01000001 means nothing until a code says it is A. The lesson how bits become letters, colours and codes starts from there.

How the table is laid out

The order is not arbitrary. The top two of the seven bits split the table into four blocks of 32, and the bottom five bits pick a character within the block.

Top bits Codes Contains
00xxxxx 0 to 31 Control codes
01xxxxx 32 to 63 Space, punctuation and the digits
10xxxxx 64 to 95 @, the capital letters and [ \ ] ^ _
11xxxxx 96 to 127 `, the small letters, { | } ~ and DEL

Why A is 65 and a is 97

Capitals sit in the third block and small letters in the fourth, at the same place, so a letter and its other case are exactly 32 apart. In binary that is a single bit:

A 65 1000001
a 97 1100001

The highlighted bit is worth 32. Setting it makes a letter small, clearing it makes it a capital, and ignoring it compares letters without regard to case. The last five bits are the letter's place in the alphabet: A and a are 1, Z and z are 26.

Digits: the low four bits are the value

The digits 0 to 9 are codes 48 to 57, which is 011 followed by the digit in four bits. Clearing the top bits turns the character into its value, and those four bits are exactly the digit's BCD code.

Char 0123456789
Dec 48495051525354555657
Hex 30313233343536373839
Low 4 bits 0000000100100011010001010110011110001001

Printable ASCII chart

All 128 codes on one sheet in the classic four blocks of 32, with decimal, hex and binary, for printing or keeping beside the keyboard.

ASCII table chart: all 128 ASCII codes in four blocks of 32, with decimal, hexadecimal and 7-bit binary values, the printable characters and the 33 control character abbreviations Click to download: ASCII table chart

Control characters

Codes 0 to 31 and 127 are not printed. They were written for teleprinters and data links, and a few are in daily use: tab, line feed, carriage return and escape. Codes 0 to 31 can each be typed as Ctrl plus the character 64 codes higher: J is 74, so Ctrl+J gives 10, LF, which is where the caret notation ^J comes from. DEL (127) is the exception: it is written ^?, because ? (63) is 64 below it.

Dec Hex Abbr Caret Name and use
0 00 NUL ^@\0 null. Does nothing. C and many languages use it to mark the end of a string.
1 01 SOH ^A start of heading. Marked the start of a message header in early data links.
2 02 STX ^B start of text. Marked where the header ended and the message text began.
3 03 ETX ^C end of text. Ended the message text. Ctrl+C sends it, which is why Ctrl+C interrupts a program.
4 04 EOT ^D end of transmission. Ended a transmission. Ctrl+D sends it, which ends input in a Unix terminal.
5 05 ENQ ^E enquiry. Asked the other end to identify itself or report its status.
6 06 ACK ^F acknowledge. Confirmed that a message arrived intact.
7 07 BEL ^G\a bell. Rang the bell on a teleprinter; terminals beep or flash.
8 08 BS ^H\b backspace. Moves the cursor back one position.
9 09 HT ^I\t horizontal tab. The tab character, moving to the next tab stop.
10 0A LF ^J\n line feed. Moves down one line. Unix, Linux and macOS end each line of text with it.
11 0B VT ^K\v vertical tab. Moved down to the next vertical tab stop on a printer.
12 0C FF ^L\f form feed. Moved a printer to the top of the next page.
13 0D CR ^M\r carriage return. Moves back to the start of the line. Windows ends lines with CR then LF.
14 0E SO ^N shift out. Switched to an alternative character set.
15 0F SI ^O shift in. Switched back to the standard character set.
16 10 DLE ^P data link escape. Made the next characters be read as data rather than control codes.
17 11 DC1 ^Q device control 1. Known as XON: tells the sender to resume. Ctrl+Q in a terminal.
18 12 DC2 ^R device control 2. A control code left for devices to define.
19 13 DC3 ^S device control 3. Known as XOFF: tells the sender to pause. Ctrl+S in a terminal.
20 14 DC4 ^T device control 4. A control code left for devices to define.
21 15 NAK ^U negative acknowledge. Reported that a message arrived damaged, asking for it again.
22 16 SYN ^V synchronous idle. Sent when there was nothing else, to keep a synchronous link in step.
23 17 ETB ^W end of transmission block. Ended one block of a longer transmission.
24 18 CAN ^X cancel. Said that the data just sent was in error and should be ignored.
25 19 EM ^Y end of medium. Marked the physical end of a tape or card deck.
26 1A SUB ^Z substitute. Stands in for a character that was invalid. Ctrl+Z, end of file in old DOS text.
27 1B ESC ^[\e escape. Starts an escape sequence, how terminals are told to move the cursor or change colour.
28 1C FS ^\ file separator. The largest of four separators for structured data.
29 1D GS ^] group separator. Separates groups within a file.
30 1E RS ^^ record separator. Separates records within a group.
31 1F US ^_ unit separator. Separates fields within a record, the smallest unit.
127 7F DEL ^? delete. All seven holes punched: on paper tape it erased whatever character had been there.

ASCII and Unicode

ASCII covers English and nothing more. Unicode gives a number, its code point, to every character in every writing system, and it starts with ASCII: A is U+0041, which is 65, in both. UTF-8, the encoding nearly every web page and file uses today, stores those first 128 as the same single bytes, so any ASCII text is already UTF-8.

Characters past 127 take two to four bytes in UTF-8. é is U+00E9, stored as 11000011 10101001. The binary translator shows this breakdown for any text, and Base64 is how those bytes are written when only ASCII characters can be sent.

Extended ASCII

ASCII uses 7 bits, and computers store 8, which leaves codes 128 to 255 free. Many character sets filled them, and all of them are loosely called extended ASCII, but there was never one standard. ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) and Windows-1252 put accented letters there, so 233 is é; the original IBM PC's code page 437 put box-drawing characters and Greek letters there, so 233 is Θ. A file written with one and read with another comes out garbled. That mess is what Unicode ended; in UTF-8, bytes above 127 only ever appear as parts of multi-byte characters.

Here are codes 128 to 255 in the two sets most often meant. Windows-1252 is what Windows used for English and Western European text, and what browsers assume when a page says it is Latin-1; its column is decoded by the browser's own decoder. It leaves 5 codes unused (81, 8D, 8F, 90, 9D). Code page 437 is the IBM PC's set, still seen in DOS programs and box-drawn text.

Dec Hex Binary Windows-1252 CP437
128 80 10000000 € Ç
129 81 10000001 unused ü
130 82 10000010 ‚ é
131 83 10000011 ƒ â
132 84 10000100 „ ä
133 85 10000101 … à
134 86 10000110 † å
135 87 10000111 ‡ ç
136 88 10001000 ˆ ê
137 89 10001001 ‰ ë
138 8A 10001010 Š è
139 8B 10001011 ‹ ï
140 8C 10001100 Œ î
141 8D 10001101 unused ì
142 8E 10001110 Ž Ä
143 8F 10001111 unused Å
144 90 10010000 unused É
145 91 10010001 ‘ æ
146 92 10010010 ’ Æ
147 93 10010011 “ ô
148 94 10010100 ” ö
149 95 10010101 • ò
150 96 10010110 – û
151 97 10010111 — ù
152 98 10011000 ˜ ÿ
153 99 10011001 ™ Ö
154 9A 10011010 š Ü
155 9B 10011011 › ¢
156 9C 10011100 œ £
157 9D 10011101 unused ¥
158 9E 10011110 ž ₧
159 9F 10011111 Ÿ ƒ
160 A0 10100000 NBSP á
161 A1 10100001 ¡ í
162 A2 10100010 ¢ ó
163 A3 10100011 £ ú
164 A4 10100100 ¤ ñ
165 A5 10100101 ¥ Ñ
166 A6 10100110 ¦ ª
167 A7 10100111 § º
168 A8 10101000 ¨ ¿
169 A9 10101001 © ⌐
170 AA 10101010 ª ¬
171 AB 10101011 « ½
172 AC 10101100 ¬ ¼
173 AD 10101101 SHY ¡
174 AE 10101110 ® «
175 AF 10101111 ¯ »
176 B0 10110000 ° ░
177 B1 10110001 ± ▒
178 B2 10110010 ² ▓
179 B3 10110011 ³ │
180 B4 10110100 ´ ┤
181 B5 10110101 µ ╡
182 B6 10110110 ╢
183 B7 10110111 · ╖
184 B8 10111000 ¸ ╕
185 B9 10111001 ¹ ╣
186 BA 10111010 º ║
187 BB 10111011 » ╗
188 BC 10111100 ¼ ╝
189 BD 10111101 ½ ╜
190 BE 10111110 ¾ ╛
191 BF 10111111 ¿ ┐
192 C0 11000000 À └
193 C1 11000001 Á ┴
194 C2 11000010 Â ┬
195 C3 11000011 Ã ├
196 C4 11000100 Ä ─
197 C5 11000101 Å ┼
198 C6 11000110 Æ ╞
199 C7 11000111 Ç ╟
200 C8 11001000 È ╚
201 C9 11001001 É ╔
202 CA 11001010 Ê ╩
203 CB 11001011 Ë ╦
204 CC 11001100 Ì ╠
205 CD 11001101 Í ═
206 CE 11001110 Î ╬
207 CF 11001111 Ï ╧
208 D0 11010000 Ð ╨
209 D1 11010001 Ñ ╤
210 D2 11010010 Ò ╥
211 D3 11010011 Ó ╙
212 D4 11010100 Ô ╘
213 D5 11010101 Õ ╒
214 D6 11010110 Ö ╓
215 D7 11010111 × ╫
216 D8 11011000 Ø ╪
217 D9 11011001 Ù ┘
218 DA 11011010 Ú ┌
219 DB 11011011 Û █
220 DC 11011100 Ü ▄
221 DD 11011101 Ý ▌
222 DE 11011110 Þ ▐
223 DF 11011111 ß ▀
224 E0 11100000 à α
225 E1 11100001 á ß
226 E2 11100010 â Γ
227 E3 11100011 ã π
228 E4 11100100 ä Σ
229 E5 11100101 å σ
230 E6 11100110 æ µ
231 E7 11100111 ç τ
232 E8 11101000 è Φ
233 E9 11101001 é Θ
234 EA 11101010 ê Ω
235 EB 11101011 ë δ
236 EC 11101100 ì ∞
237 ED 11101101 í φ
238 EE 11101110 î ε
239 EF 11101111 ï ∩
240 F0 11110000 ð ≡
241 F1 11110001 ñ ±
242 F2 11110010 ò ≥
243 F3 11110011 ó ≤
244 F4 11110100 ô ⌠
245 F5 11110101 õ ⌡
246 F6 11110110 ö ÷
247 F7 11110111 ÷ ≈
248 F8 11111000 ø °
249 F9 11111001 ù ∙
250 FA 11111010 ú ·
251 FB 11111011 û √
252 FC 11111100 ü ⁿ
253 FD 11111101 ý ²
254 FE 11111110 þ ■
255 FF 11111111 ÿ NBSP

NBSP is a no-break space and SHY a soft hyphen, both invisible. In UTF-8 none of these is one byte: é, 233 in Windows-1252, is stored as C3 A9.

Questions

What is the ASCII code for A?

Capital A is 65 in decimal, 41 in hex and 1000001 in binary. Small a is 97, 61 in hex. The capitals run from 65 to 90 and the small letters from 97 to 122, in alphabetical order.

How many characters are in ASCII?

128, numbered 0 to 127, because ASCII uses 7 bits and 2^7 is 128. 33 of them are control codes, which are not printed; the other 95 are the space, digits, letters and punctuation.

What is the difference between ASCII and Unicode?

ASCII has 128 characters, enough for English. Unicode numbers every character of every writing system, well over 100,000 of them, and its first 128 are ASCII with the same numbers. UTF-8, the usual way to store Unicode, stores those 128 as the same single bytes, so ASCII text is valid UTF-8.

Why is a 32 more than A?

So that changing case is a single bit. A is 1000001 and a is 1100001: they differ only in the bit worth 32. Old hardware could switch case, or ignore it when comparing, by setting or clearing that bit.

What are the characters 128 to 255?

They are not ASCII. ASCII stops at 127. Many 8-bit character sets, loosely called extended ASCII, used 128 to 255 for accented letters, box drawing and symbols, but each set used them differently, so the same byte could be é on one computer and something else on another. Unicode and UTF-8 replaced them.

What is the difference between LF and CR?

LF, line feed, is code 10 and moves down a line; CR, carriage return, is code 13 and moves back to the start of the line. They come from teleprinters, which needed both. Unix, Linux and macOS end a line of text with LF alone, Windows with CR followed by LF.