ASCII and Unicode Character Lookup — Decimal, Hex, Binary and HTML Entities
Our free ASCII and Unicode lookup tool instantly converts any character to its decimal ASCII code, hexadecimal value, binary representation, Unicode code point and HTML entity. Type a character to see all its values, or enter a code to find the character. The complete ASCII table with filter search is included for quick reference.
What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the foundational character encoding standard for computers and communication equipment. Originally defined in 1963, it assigns a unique 7-bit number (0–127) to 128 characters: 33 non-printable control characters (0–31 and 127) and 95 printable characters including letters, digits, punctuation and space. ASCII remains the basis for virtually all modern character encodings including UTF-8, which is backward-compatible with ASCII for the first 128 code points.
ASCII vs Unicode vs UTF-8
- ASCII — 7-bit, 128 characters, English only. The original standard.
- Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) — 8-bit, 256 characters, extended to cover Western European languages
- Unicode — Universal standard covering over 140,000 characters from all writing systems, emojis, mathematical symbols and more. Code points range from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.
- UTF-8 — Variable-width encoding of Unicode. Uses 1 byte for ASCII characters (backward compatible), 2–4 bytes for other Unicode characters. The dominant encoding on the web (98%+ of all websites).
- UTF-16 — 2 or 4 bytes per character. Used internally by Windows, Java and JavaScript.
Important ASCII Control Characters for IT
- 9 (0x09) — Tab character ( )
- 10 (0x0A) — Line Feed / newline ( ) — Unix line ending
- 13 (0x0D) — Carriage Return ( ) — Windows uses for line endings
- 27 (0x1B) — Escape character — used in ANSI terminal escape sequences
- 32 (0x20) — Space character
- 127 (0x7F) — Delete (DEL) control character