What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that uses 7 bits to represent characters, allowing it to encode 128 unique characters (0-127).
Developed in the 1960s, ASCII became the foundation of character encoding in computing and telecommunications equipment.
Common Use Cases
- Text Data Storage: ASCII is the basis for text files in computing systems.
- Data Transmission: Used in network protocols, email, and data exchange.
- Programming: Source code in most programming languages uses ASCII.
- Legacy Systems: Many older systems and databases still rely on ASCII.
- Keyboards: ASCII defines the mappings between keyboard keys and character codes.
ASCII Limitations
- Limited Character Set: Only 128 characters, insufficient for many languages.
- No International Support: Lacks symbols and characters needed for non-English languages.
- Extended ASCII: Various 8-bit extensions were created but lacked standardization.
- Unicode Solution: Unicode was developed to address these limitations, supporting millions of characters.
Comprehensive ASCII Tools
ASCII Table
Complete reference for all 128 standard ASCII characters (7-bit)
Browse, search, and filter standard ASCII characters with detailed information including binary, hex, and Unicode values.
Extended ASCII
Reference for extended ASCII characters (128-255)
Explore extended ASCII characters across different encoding standards including Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, and UTF-8.
ASCII Converter
Convert text between different ASCII formats
Convert plain text to ASCII codes, binary, hexadecimal, and other formats. Perfect for developers working with character encoding.
Keyboard Map
Visualize keyboard character mappings
Interactive keyboard map showing ASCII values, key codes, and character information. A must-have tool for keyboard-related development.