ASCII Table Explorer
Search and explore the full ASCII table including control codes.
ASCII Table Explorer
| Dec | Hex | Char | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | 0x20 | Space | |
| 33 | 0x21 | ! | Printable character ! |
| 34 | 0x22 | " | Printable character " |
| 35 | 0x23 | # | Printable character # |
| 36 | 0x24 | $ | Printable character $ |
| 37 | 0x25 | % | Printable character % |
| 38 | 0x26 | & | Printable character & |
| 39 | 0x27 | ' | Printable character ' |
| 40 | 0x28 | ( | Printable character ( |
| 41 | 0x29 | ) | Printable character ) |
| 42 | 0x2A | * | Printable character * |
| 43 | 0x2B | + | Printable character + |
| 44 | 0x2C | , | Printable character , |
| 45 | 0x2D | - | Printable character - |
| 46 | 0x2E | . | Printable character . |
| 47 | 0x2F | / | Printable character / |
| 48 | 0x30 | 0 | Printable character 0 |
| 49 | 0x31 | 1 | Printable character 1 |
| 50 | 0x32 | 2 | Printable character 2 |
| 51 | 0x33 | 3 | Printable character 3 |
| 52 | 0x34 | 4 | Printable character 4 |
| 53 | 0x35 | 5 | Printable character 5 |
| 54 | 0x36 | 6 | Printable character 6 |
| 55 | 0x37 | 7 | Printable character 7 |
| 56 | 0x38 | 8 | Printable character 8 |
| 57 | 0x39 | 9 | Printable character 9 |
| 58 | 0x3A | : | Printable character : |
| 59 | 0x3B | ; | Printable character ; |
| 60 | 0x3C | < | Printable character < |
| 61 | 0x3D | = | Printable character = |
| 62 | 0x3E | > | Printable character > |
| 63 | 0x3F | ? | Printable character ? |
Runs entirely in your browser
This tool executes locally using standard browser APIs (for example window.crypto.getRandomValues or crypto.subtle where applicable). Your input is not transmitted to or stored on a ScriptPulse server. See How Calculations Work.
What This Tool Does
- The ASCII Table Explorer is a searchable reference for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange — the original 7-bit character encoding that assigns a single numeric value (0 through 127) to each of the English alphabet's letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a set of non-printing control codes inherited from early teletype equipment. It's the foundational character set nearly every other text encoding in use today either extends or remains compatible with.
- ASCII's lasting importance isn't historical trivia — UTF-8, the dominant text encoding on the modern web, was deliberately designed so that every ASCII character (code points 0–127) encodes to the exact same single byte in UTF-8 as it did in plain ASCII. This byte-for-byte compatibility is why so much legacy ASCII-based tooling and file content continues to work correctly even after being reinterpreted as UTF-8, and why understanding the ASCII table specifically is the right starting point before moving on to Unicode's much larger code space.
- This tool covers the 32 printable, non-control characters starting at code 32 (space); the Unicode Inspector is the natural next step once you need to go beyond ASCII's 128-character range into the full Unicode Standard's much larger set of code points.
How It Works
- Each entry in the table shows a character's decimal value, its hexadecimal value, the character itself, and a short description.
- The search filters the table by decimal value, hexadecimal value, or the character itself, letting you quickly look up any of these three representations from any of the others.
- Code point 32 (space) and above are the traditionally 'printable' ASCII range; codes 0–31 and 127 are control characters (tab, line feed, escape, and similar), inherited from early terminal and teletype hardware rather than representing visible glyphs.
- Because ASCII assigns exactly one meaning per code point across all 128 values, looking up any character's numeric value here is unambiguous — unlike looking up a Unicode code point, ASCII has no notion of combining characters, normalization forms, or multiple valid representations of the same character.
Usage
- Search by character, decimal value, or hexadecimal value.
- Review the matching table rows.
- Cross-reference the decimal, hex, and character representations for the value you need.
- Use the confirmed value in your protocol, script, or byte-level comparison.
Examples
- Looking up the decimal value of a specific punctuation character needed for a CSV or delimiter-parsing routine that splits on an exact byte value.
- Confirming code 127 is the DEL control character (not a printable character) when it unexpectedly appears in a text file being debugged.
- Cross-referencing hexadecimal byte values from a network packet capture back to their printable ASCII meaning.
- Verifying which characters fall in the 'safe' printable range before deciding whether a filename or identifier needs additional escaping for a legacy system.
Real-World Use Cases
- Looking up the exact decimal or hexadecimal value of a specific character needed for a low-level protocol, a byte-comparison routine, or a regular expression built around character codes.
- Confirming which numeric range in a byte stream represents printable text versus non-printing control characters, when debugging a serial communication or legacy file format issue.
- Understanding which characters are 'ASCII-safe' (guaranteed to be represented identically across virtually any text encoding) before deciding whether a value needs escaping or encoding for a specific transport.
- Cross-referencing a decimal character code seen in error output or a hex dump back to the actual printable character it represents.
Best Practices
- Use ASCII's guaranteed byte-for-byte compatibility with UTF-8 as your baseline assumption for any character in this table — text limited to these 128 characters behaves identically across virtually every modern encoding.
- Treat control characters (codes 0–31, 127) as distinct from printable text when parsing or displaying data — many of them have specific, non-visual meanings that shouldn't be rendered as glyphs.
- When working with characters outside this 128-value range, move to the Unicode Inspector rather than assuming an extended ASCII variant (like Latin-1) — 'extended ASCII' is not a single standard and varies by system.
- Reference this table directly instead of memorizing common code points — decimal-to-character mapping is exactly the kind of detail worth looking up rather than recalling from memory under time pressure.
Common Mistakes
- Assuming 'ASCII' and 'plain text' are interchangeable terms for any character set limited to a single byte per character — many 8-bit 'extended ASCII' variants (Latin-1, Windows-1252, and others) diverge from each other above code 127, while true 7-bit ASCII (0–127) is universally consistent.
- Treating a control character (like code 7, the historical 'bell' signal) as if it were a printable character when displaying or logging raw byte values.
- Forgetting that ASCII has no representation for accented letters, most punctuation used outside English, or any non-Latin script at all — anything beyond the 128 base values requires moving to Unicode.
- Assuming a decimal and hexadecimal value pair are unrelated facts to memorize separately, rather than two representations of the exact same underlying numeric value.
Limitations
- This reference covers standard 7-bit ASCII (codes 0–127) specifically; it does not cover 8-bit 'extended ASCII' variants, which are not standardized consistently across systems.
- It does not perform encoding or decoding of arbitrary text — use the Text to Binary or Text to Unicode tools for converting actual text content into another representation.
- For characters beyond ASCII's 128-value range, use the Unicode Inspector, which covers the full Unicode Standard's much larger code space.
Technical Reference Guide
- ASCII is formally standardized as ANSI X3.4 (American National Standards Institute) and internationally as ISO/IEC 646, defining the same 128-character 7-bit code.
- RFC 20, one of the internet's earliest RFCs, formally adopted ASCII as the standard character set for representing text within IETF network protocols.
- UTF-8's deliberate design choice to encode code points 0–127 identically to plain ASCII (a single, unchanged byte per character) is specified within RFC 3629, the current UTF-8 standard.
FAQ
Why does UTF-8 text often look identical to plain ASCII text?
Because UTF-8 was deliberately designed so every ASCII character (code points 0–127) encodes to the exact same single byte it always had in plain ASCII. Text limited to those characters is byte-for-byte identical whether you consider it ASCII or UTF-8.
What are the non-printing control characters for?
Codes 0–31 and 127 originated as control signals for early teletype and terminal hardware — tab, line feed, carriage return, and similar. They have functional meaning but no visual glyph of their own.
Is 'extended ASCII' the same everywhere?
No — there's no single 'extended ASCII' standard. Various 8-bit character sets (Latin-1, Windows-1252, and others) each extend the base 128 ASCII values differently above code 127, which is why relying on anything beyond standard ASCII requires knowing the specific extended set in use.
Can ASCII represent accented letters or non-Latin scripts?
No — ASCII's 128 code points cover only unaccented English letters, digits, and common punctuation. Anything else (accented characters, non-Latin scripts, emoji) requires Unicode, covered by the Unicode Inspector.
Why do decimal and hexadecimal values for the same character look so different?
They're just two different numeral bases representing the identical underlying value — decimal (base 10) and hexadecimal (base 16) are simply different notations for the same number, the same relationship the Number Base Converter covers generally.
Is code 0 a real character?
It's the NUL control character — historically used as a string terminator in many programming languages (including C) — not a printable character. It has functional significance but no visual representation.
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