ASCII Table

About the ASCII Table

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, numbers 128 characters from 0 to 127 using 7 bits. Codes 0 to 31 and code 127 are control characters, which began as commands for teleprinters: 9 is the horizontal tab, 10 the line feed, 13 the carriage return, 27 the escape character and 127 delete. Codes 32 to 126 are the 95 printable characters: the space (32), the digits 0 to 9 (48 to 57), the uppercase letters A to Z (65 to 90), the lowercase letters a to z (97 to 122) and the punctuation and symbols between them. An uppercase letter and the matching lowercase letter differ by exactly 32, which is a single bit, so setting bit 5 turns A (65, binary 01000001) into a (97, binary 01100001). Each control character can also be typed with the Control key: Ctrl+J sends the line feed and Ctrl+[ sends escape, because the control code is the letter's code minus 64. The table lists the usual escape sequences, such as backslash n for the line feed and backslash t for the tab. Unicode keeps the same 128 characters as its first code points, and UTF-8 stores each of them as one byte with the same value, so plain ASCII text is also valid UTF-8. Characters above 127, such as accented letters and the euro sign, are not part of ASCII; they belong to extended encodings and to Unicode. Nothing is uploaded.