ASCII Table: Full Character Reference (0–127)

ASCII Character Table Reference

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard defines 128 characters numbered 0–127. Each entry shows the character's decimal value, hexadecimal, octal, 8-bit binary representation, the character itself (or its control-character abbreviation), any C-style escape sequence, and a plain-English description.

Control characters (0–31 and 127)

The first 32 characters and the final one (DEL, 127) are non-printable control characters. They were originally designed to control teletype machines and serial communication. Most remain relevant: LF (10) is still used for line breaks in Unix files, CR (13) in Windows line endings (CRLF), HT (9) for tabs, and ESC (27) for ANSI escape sequences in terminal emulators.

Printable characters (32–126)

Characters 32–126 are printable. Space (32) through tilde (~, 126) includes digits 0–9 (48–57), uppercase letters A–Z (65–90), lowercase letters a–z (97–122), and a range of punctuation and symbol characters. The table names each punctuation glyph, which makes a character such as an ampersand or backslash searchable by its common name.

How to use this table

Type in the search box to filter by any column. Click any value in a row to copy it to your clipboard, including the decimal and hexadecimal HTML numeric references. The named-entity column shows a copyable HTML name when one is defined, such as & for ampersand, and says “Not available” when no named reference is supplied. Use the category filter buttons to show only control or printable characters. For example, code 65 is the letter A: its decimal HTML reference is A, its hexadecimal reference is A, and it has no named entity in this table.

HTML numeric references identify Unicode code points rather than raw bytes. Control characters are not all useful as HTML text: for example, � is parsed as the replacement character U+FFFD, so use the byte value itself when you need to preserve a NUL byte.

Extended byte values and encodings (128–255)

The interactive “Extended (not ASCII)” reference keeps bytes 128–255 separate from the standard 0–127 ASCII table. These bytes are not part of 7-bit ASCII, and their interpretation depends on the selected encoding. Windows-1252 is selected initially because it is common in older Windows documents; ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) is available for comparison. The highlighted 0x80–0x9F range is where those two encodings differ. Windows-1252 maps many of those bytes to typographic punctuation and the euro sign, while ISO-8859-1 displays them as named C1 control labels. Five Windows-1252 byte values in that range are undefined and are shown explicitly instead of being guessed as characters.

• ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1): A single-byte character set whose upper half includes Western European characters such as é, ä, and ñ, plus the C1 controls at 0x80–0x9F.
• Windows-1252 (cp1252): A related single-byte encoding that assigns many bytes in 0x80–0x9F to characters such as €, curly quotation marks, and en/em dashes.
• UTF-8: Multi-byte encoding for Unicode characters. Bytes 0x80–0xBF are continuation bytes in valid multi-byte sequences, while bytes 0xC0–0xFF cannot begin a valid UTF-8 sequence. An isolated byte in this range is not a complete UTF-8 character.

This reference shows the interpretation of each byte under the selected single-byte encoding; it does not detect an unknown file encoding. UTF-8 uses multi-byte sequences for characters outside ASCII, so an isolated byte from 128–255 is not a complete UTF-8 character. Opening a file with the wrong encoding can produce garbled text (“mojibake”); specify the encoding when reading or writing files. All mappings and search run locally in your browser.

Keyboard shortcuts for control characters