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.

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. Use the category filter buttons to show only control or printable characters.

Extended ASCII and encoding (128–255)

Values 128–255 are not part of the standard 7-bit ASCII specification. How they are interpreted depends entirely on the character encoding in use:

• ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1): The original 8-bit extension. Covers Western European characters (é, ä, ñ, etc.).
• Windows-1252 (cp1252): Microsoft's superset of Latin-1. Differs in the 128–159 range (adds €, “”, ‘’, etc. where ISO 8859-1 has control characters).
• UTF-8: Multi-byte encoding for all Unicode code points. Values 128–255 are continuation bytes in UTF-8, not standalone characters.

When you open a file with the wrong encoding, characters in this range appear garbled ("mojibake"). Always specify encoding explicitly when reading or writing files.

Keyboard shortcuts for control characters