ASCII

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The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a plain text encoding standard used internationally as the basic human-readable encoding standard. The most commonly used (and the definitively standardized) form of ASCII is 7-bit ASCII, which uses characters 0 through 0x7F (decimal 127) to display all the basic Latin alphabet characters, plus Arabic numerals, international text symbols, and ASCII control codes.

Table of 7-bit ASCII characters

00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F
00 NUL SOH STX ETX EOT ENQ ACK BEL BS HT LF VT FF CR SO SI
10 DLE DC1 DC2 DC3 DC4 NAK SYN ETB CAN EM SUB ESC FS GS RS US
20 SP ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
30 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
40 @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
50 P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
60 ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
70 p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ DEL

IBM Extended ASCII

IBM created an "Extended ASCII" character set to utilize the eighth bit provided by 8-bit bytes that was unused by the 7-bit ASCII standard. This meant another 128 possible character spaces were free and usable. The Extended ASCII set is the one used in the text mode of IBM-compatible x86 BIOSes and/or video cards. These characters include European language accented vowels, Greek symbols, and the IBM box drawing characters. A table of the Extended ASCII characters can be found in one of the pages in the external links section below.

External Links

  • http://www.asciitable.com/ - tables of both standardized 7-bit and IBM Extended ASCII characters and numerical equivalents.
  • http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/ - tables of ASCII characters and their graphical symbols (those used in VGA text mode). Also has information on the history of ASCII.