ASCII

Short for American Standard Code for Information Interexchange, ASCII is an industry standard, which assigns letters, numbers and other characters within the 256 slots available in the 8-bit code.

The ASCII table is divided in 3 sections:

• Non printable, system codes between 0 and 31.

• Lower ASCII, between 32 and 127. This part of the table (as shown below) originates from older, American systems, which worked on 7-bit character tables. Foreign letters, like and were not available then.

• Higher ASCII, between 128 and 255. This part is programmable, in that you can exchange characters based on language you want to write in. Foreign letters are placed in this part and an example is shown below.

Below is the standard ASCII characters.

Dec	Char	Dec	Char	Dec	Char	Dec	Char	Dec	Char	Dec	Char
33	!	49	1	65	A	81	Q	97	a	113	q
34	"	50	2	66	B	82	R	98	b	114	r
35	#	51	3	67	C	83	S	99	c	115	s
36	$	52	4	68	D	84	T	100	d	116	t
37	%	53	5	69	E	85	U	101	e	117	u
38	&	54	6	70	F	86	V	102	f	118	v
39	'	55	7	71	G	87	W	103	g	119	w
40	(	56	8	72	H	88	X	104	h	120	x
41	)	57	9	73	I	89	Y	105	i	121	y
42	*	58	:	74	J	90	Z	106	j	122	z
43	+	59	;	75	K	91	[	107	k	123	{
44	,	60	<	76	L	92	\	108	l	124	|
45	-	61	=	77	M	93	]	109	m	125	}
46	.	62	>	78	N	94	^	110	n	126	~
47	/	63	?	79	O	95	_	111	o	127	_
48	0	64	@	80	P	96	`	112	p

While the regular American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) uses seven bits of code characters (equaling 128 characters), extended ASCII uses eight bits, adding another 128 characters. The original ASCII defines the codes for the average letters and numbers used by computers. Extended ASCII defined extra characters, such as a special symbols, foreign language letters, or drawing characters.

Below is the extended ASCII characters.

Also see: ASCII Art, ASCII printer, Character code, Codepage, EBCDIC, Programming definitions, Unicode

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