ASCII Converter

Convert text to ASCII codes and back — decimal, hex, octal and binary representations with a full reference table.

About ASCII Conversion

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numeric codes 0–127 to the most common characters used in English text — uppercase and lowercase letters, digits 0–9, punctuation, and control characters. Created in 1963, ASCII remains the foundation of all modern character encodings including UTF-8, which is backward compatible with ASCII for the first 128 code points.

Understanding ASCII codes is fundamental for many programming tasks: bitwise operations, low-level string manipulation, network protocol implementation, file format parsing, and security analysis. For example, knowing that uppercase letters are ASCII 65–90 and lowercase are 97–122 allows you to toggle case by XORing with 32 (the bit difference between the two ranges).

This tool converts text to ASCII codes in decimal, hexadecimal, octal, or binary format, and also converts code sequences back to text. The character breakdown table shows all four representations simultaneously for each character, making it a quick reference for programming work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ASCII code for space, Enter, and Tab?
Space is ASCII 32 (0x20), Tab is ASCII 9 (0x09), and Enter/newline is ASCII 10 (0x0A). Carriage return is ASCII 13 (0x0D). These control characters are important in network protocols and text file formats.
What's the difference between ASCII and Unicode?
ASCII only covers 128 characters (English letters, digits, basic punctuation). Unicode covers over 140,000 characters from all writing systems worldwide. UTF-8 is the most common Unicode encoding and is a superset of ASCII — the first 128 UTF-8 code points are identical to ASCII.
What are ASCII control characters?
ASCII codes 0–31 and 127 are non-printable control characters used for device control and text formatting. Common ones: 7 (BEL/bell), 8 (BS/backspace), 9 (HT/tab), 10 (LF/line feed), 13 (CR/carriage return), 27 (ESC/escape), 127 (DEL/delete).