ASCII Converter

What is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numeric codes to letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. Developed in the 1960s, ASCII uses 7 bits to represent 128 different characters (0-127). It became the foundation for text representation in computers and remains the basis for many modern encoding systems like UTF-8.

Range: 0-127 (128 characters total)

Example: 'A' = 65, 'a' = 97, '0' = 48, Space = 32

ASCII Character Groups

ASCII characters are organized into several groups: Control characters (0-31) for device control and formatting; printable characters (32-126) including space, letters, digits, and symbols; uppercase letters (65-90) from A to Z; lowercase letters (97-122) from a to z; digits (48-57) from 0 to 9; and special character 127 (DEL). This organization makes ASCII logical and easy to work with programmatically.

Groups: Control (0-31), Printable (32-126), DEL (127)

Useful fact: Lowercase = Uppercase + 32

Number System Representations

ASCII codes can be represented in multiple number systems. Decimal is the standard human-readable format (0-127). Binary uses 8 bits for representation, making it easy to see the underlying computer storage. Hexadecimal (0x00-0x7F) is compact and commonly used in programming. Octal (000-177) was historically important and is still used in some Unix contexts. Each system has advantages for different use cases.

Example 'A': Decimal 65, Binary 01000001, Hex 0x41, Octal 101

Extended ASCII

Extended ASCII uses 8 bits instead of 7, allowing for 256 characters (0-255). The additional 128 characters (128-255) include accented letters, currency symbols, and graphical characters. However, Extended ASCII is not standardized—different code pages define different characters for codes 128-255. This lack of standardization led to the development of Unicode and UTF-8.

Range: 128-255 (varies by code page)

Note: Not standardized; use UTF-8 for international text

Common Uses

ASCII converters are essential tools for programmers and computer science students. They're used for debugging character encoding issues, understanding how text is stored in memory, creating custom protocols, analyzing binary data, learning programming concepts, and converting between different representations. ASCII remains fundamental to understanding how computers represent text.

Applications: Programming, debugging, data analysis, education, protocol design