ASCII Encoder/Decoder — Free Online Text to ASCII Code Converter
Convert text to ASCII decimal codes and decode ASCII numbers back to text — shows decimal code point for each character.
Frequently Asked Questions
ASCII Character Codes Explained
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), published in 1963, defines 128 characters: 33 control characters (0–31, 127) and 95 printable characters (32–126). Despite its age and limited range, ASCII remains foundational — the first 128 code points of Unicode are identical to ASCII, making virtually all text protocols ASCII-compatible.
The printable ASCII range (32–126) includes: space (32), digits 0-9 (48-57), uppercase A-Z (65-90), lowercase a-z (97-122), and various punctuation. The 32-point offset between uppercase and lowercase is deliberate — you can toggle case with a single bitwise XOR with 32 (0x20).
This encoding (text ↔ decimal codes) is useful for learning ASCII tables, debugging character handling in legacy systems, understanding protocol byte values, or working with systems that represent characters as their numeric codes. For high-performance binary representation, hex encoding is more compact and common in modern tooling.