ASCII Table Reference

What You’ll Learn

This page explains the ASCII character table in plain language. You will learn what each code means, how to read decimal and hexadecimal values, and how to use ASCII in HTML and JavaScript.

What is ASCII Table?

The ASCII table, also known as the ASCII character set, is a standardized table that assigns unique numeric codes to represent characters in digital computing systems.

ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It was one of the earliest character encoding standards, developed in the 1960s, and remains the foundation of text on computers and the web today.

When you type the letter A on a keyboard, the computer does not store the shape of the letter—it stores the number 65. The ASCII table is the dictionary that maps numbers to characters (and back).

What do ASCII Table Contains?

The standard ASCII table consists of 128 characters, numbered from 0 to 127. These include uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation marks, special symbols, and control characters.

The first 32 codes (0–31) are control characters—non-printable codes used to control devices such as printers and terminals (for example, line feed, tab, and escape).

Code 127 is DEL (delete). The remaining codes (32–126) represent printable characters, including space (code 32), letters, digits, and symbols.

Many systems also refer to extended ASCII (codes 128–255) for additional symbols and accented letters. The full table below includes both standard and extended ranges for reference.

🔢 Decimal, Hexadecimal & Octal

Each ASCII character can be written as the same code in different number bases. Developers often use hexadecimal because it is compact and aligns with bytes.

• Decimal (Dec) — base 10, everyday counting (65 for A).
• Hexadecimal (Hex) — base 16, uses 0–9 and A–F (41 for A).
• Octal (Oct) — base 8, common in older Unix file permissions and legacy systems.

ASCII Table

Here is the complete ASCII table showing decimal, hexadecimal, octal, character, and description for codes 0 through 255. Use the search box to filter by number, character, or description.

Need a searchable, filterable view? Try our Interactive ASCII Tool (standard ASCII 0–127 with categories and copy buttons).

🛠 How to Use ASCII Codes

In HTML

Use numeric character references: A (decimal) or A (hex) both display A. See HTML Entities for named entities like ©.

In JavaScript

"A".charCodeAt(0) returns 65. String.fromCharCode(65) returns "A".

In C

Characters are integers: char c = 'A'; stores 65. Print with printf("%c", 65); or printf("%d", 'A');.

In Python

ord('A') returns 65. chr(65) returns 'A'.

Examples Gallery

Three practical snippets. Use View Output to preview here, or open Try It Yourself to edit and run live in the browser.

<p>Letter A: &#65;</p>
<p>Same letter (hex): &#x41;</p>
<p>Copyright symbol: &#169;</p>

Letter A: A
Same letter (hex): A
Copyright symbol: ©

var letter = "A";
console.log(letter.charCodeAt(0));  // 65
console.log(String.fromCharCode(65)); // "A"
console.log("a".charCodeAt(0));      // 97

65
A
97

for (var i = 32; i <= 126; i++) {
  document.write(String.fromCharCode(i) + " ");
}

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

🌐 ASCII vs Unicode

Unicode is a universal character set with over a million code points, including emoji, scripts from every language, and mathematical symbols. The first 128 Unicode code points are identical to ASCII.

On the web, text is almost always stored as UTF-8, which encodes ASCII characters in one byte and uses multiple bytes for other characters. Plain ASCII files are valid UTF-8 files.

Summary

• ASCII maps characters to numbers 0–127 (standard) with extended codes up to 255.
• Codes 0–31 and 127 are control characters; 32–126 are printable.
• Uppercase A = 65 (hex 41); lowercase a = 97 (hex 61).
• Use decimal or hex HTML entities, JavaScript charCodeAt, or language equivalents.
• Modern web pages use UTF-8, which is backward-compatible with ASCII.

💡 Best Practices