ASCII/Unicode Table
Interactive ASCII and Unicode character table with search by character, code, or name.
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
What it's for
Complete interactive ASCII and Unicode table
Full ASCII + Unicode
Covers all 128 ASCII characters and lets you explore any Unicode block by name or code point.
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Multiple representations
Decimal, hex, octal, binary, HTML entity, JS/Python/C escape, and official Unicode name.
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How it works
Three steps, no hassle
Search for a character or code
Type a character (A, €, ñ), a decimal code (65), hex (0x41), or the Unicode name (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A).
Browse the table
Navigate through all 128 ASCII characters or explore Unicode blocks. Each entry shows decimal, hex, octal, binary, and official name.
Copy the code
Copy the character, HTML code (A), JavaScript escape sequence (\u0041), or Unicode code point (U+0041).
FAQ
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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding standard published in 1963 by the ASA (American Standards Association, now ANSI). It defines 128 characters: 33 non-printable control characters (0-31 and 127) and 95 printable characters (uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation, and basic symbols). It was designed primarily by Bob Bemer and became the universal standard for English-language data communication.
ASCII is a 7-bit system with 128 characters, for English only. Unicode is an international standard that assigns a unique number (code point) to every character of every writing system in the world; version 15.1 defines 149,186 characters. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding for Unicode: it uses 1 byte for ASCII (backward compatible), 2 bytes for accented Latin characters and other scripts, 3 bytes for most CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters, and 4 bytes for emojis and historic characters.
Unicode 15.1 (published September 2023) defines 149,186 characters across 161 scripts. The total Unicode code point space is 1,114,112 (from U+0000 to U+10FFFF), divided into 17 planes of 65,536 code points each. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP, U+0000-U+FFFF) contains the most common characters. Planes 1-16 are 'supplementary planes' including emojis (Emoticons block, U+1F600-U+1F64F), historic characters, and less-used scripts.
The first 32 ASCII characters (0-31) are control characters inherited from teletype systems. The most relevant today: NUL (0) string terminator in C, TAB (9) horizontal tab, LF (10 / \n) line feed (Unix newline), CR (13 / \r) carriage return (old Mac, and \r\n on Windows), ESC (27) used in ANSI terminal sequences, DEL (127) delete. The \r\n (Windows) vs \n (Unix) difference in text files is one of the most frequent issues in cross-platform development.
Original ASCII only defines characters 0-127 (7 bits). 'Extended ASCII' uses the eighth bit (128-255) but is not a single standard: multiple incompatible encodings exist. The most common are ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1, for Western Europe), Windows-1252 (similar to Latin-1 but with extra characters like €), CP437 (the original IBM PC encoding, with box-drawing characters). This incompatibility was one of the key motivators for developing Unicode.
ASCII history (Bob Bemer 1963), the Unicode Consortium, and UTF-8 encoding (Rob Pike/Ken Thompson 1992)
ASCII was developed primarily by Bob Bemer, an IBM engineer who was a pioneer of standardization in computing. The first draft of the standard was presented in 1963 by the ASA (American Standards Association). Bemer also contributed to the adoption of the backslash (\) in ASCII and was a pioneer in alerting about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem as early as 1958. ASCII solved a critical problem: in the 1960s there were dozens of incompatible character codes (BCD, IBM's EBCDIC, Baudot from teletypes), making communication between systems from different manufacturers impossible.
Unicode was conceived in 1987 by Joe Becker (Xerox) and Lee Collins and Mark Davis (Apple) to create a universal encoding system. The Unicode Consortium was founded in January 1991 and published version 1.0 in October 1991, covering 7,161 characters. Growth has been exponential: Unicode 2.0 (1996) added the complete CJK character set with 20,902 ideographs. Unicode 6.0 (2010) added the first official emojis. The Consortium coordinates with ISO (the ISO/IEC 10646 standard is identical to Unicode in its character repertoire).
UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in September 1992, literally on a napkin during dinner, according to legend. The key to UTF-8's design is its backward compatibility with ASCII: any valid ASCII text is automatically valid UTF-8 text. Multi-byte UTF-8 bytes never contain values in the ASCII range (0-127), which allows ASCII bytes to be distinguished from bytes in multi-byte sequences. This compatibility was crucial for adoption: systems that assumed ASCII kept working. UTF-8 is now the dominant encoding on the web (>98% according to W3Techs) and the default encoding in most modern programming languages.