What is ASCII and how does it work?▾
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) is a character encoding standard that represents text characters using numeric codes. Each character is assigned a unique decimal value from 0 to 127 for standard ASCII. For example, the letter 'A' is 65, space is 32, and newline is 10. Extended ASCII includes values 128-255 for additional characters like accented letters and symbols.
What is the difference between ASCII and Unicode?▾
ASCII is limited to 128 characters (or 256 with extended ASCII) and primarily covers English letters, digits, and basic symbols. Unicode is a much larger standard supporting over 1.1 million characters, including letters from all world languages, emoji, mathematical symbols, and more. Unicode is backward compatible with ASCII — ASCII characters have the same Unicode code points (0-127).
How do I find the ASCII code for a specific character?▾
Simply type the character into the text field and the tool displays its ASCII decimal code, hex value, and octal representation. For example, typing 'A' shows decimal 65, hex 41, and octal 101. The tool shows codes for every character including spaces, punctuation, and special characters.
Can I convert from ASCII codes back to text?▾
Yes. Enter ASCII codes (decimal, hex, or octal values separated by spaces or commas) in the decode field, and the tool converts them back to readable text. For example, entering '72 101 108 108 111' produces 'Hello'.
What characters are included in ASCII?▾
Standard ASCII (0-127) includes uppercase letters (A-Z, 65-90), lowercase letters (a-z, 97-122), digits (0-9, 48-57), punctuation marks, whitespace characters (space 32, tab 9, newline 10), and control characters (0-31, mostly non-printable). Extended ASCII (128-255) includes accented characters (é, ñ, ü), box drawing characters, and mathematical symbols.
What are hex and octal representations?▾
Hexadecimal (base-16) represents numbers using 0-9 and A-F. Octal (base-8) uses 0-7. These are alternative ways to represent the same numeric value. For example, decimal 65 ('A') is hex 41 and octal 101. Programmers often use hex for character codes since 8-bit values fit neatly into 2 hex digits (00-FF).
Why would I need to convert text to ASCII codes?▾
Developers use ASCII code conversion for character encoding validation, debugging encoding issues, creating obfuscated text, analyzing data formats, teaching computer science, working with legacy systems that use character codes, and verifying that specific characters are correctly processed. It is essential for low-level programming and understanding how computers represent text.
Is this text to ASCII converter free?▾
Yes, completely free with no signup required. Convert text to ASCII/Unicode codes in decimal, hex, and octal formats, or decode codes back to text. All processing happens in your browser — your data is never sent to any server.
