ASCII to Text and Text to ASCII

How it works

Type text or codes separated by spaces into the left box; the tool works out which one it is. Type "Hi" and you get 72 105; type 72 101 108 108 111 and you read "Hello". Pick how the codes are written under "Code notation": decimal is the number in an ASCII table (H = 72), hexadecimal is the same number in base 16 (48), and Unicode is the U+0048 form you look up in Unicode charts. When decoding, codes with a U+ or 0x prefix are read whatever the notation setting, and commas and line breaks also count as separators. Accented letters and symbols are not in ASCII: type "é" and you get 233, and the result line says it is outside ASCII (Unicode); ASCII covers only 0–127. Control codes such as 10 (line feed, LF) or 9 (tab, TAB) are written into the text as real characters and named in the result line. Switch on "Character–code table" and every distinct character gets a row under the result with its decimal, hex and U+ value and its type, ready to copy into homework or notes.

This tool is also known as ascii to text, text to ascii, ascii code converter, ascii table, decimal to ascii.

What is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the character table that gives letters, digits and symbols a number from 0 to 127. This 7-bit table is the base of every modern encoding: UTF-8 and Unicode share the first 128 numbers with ASCII exactly, so the codes of an English sentence are the same on every system. The table holds 33 control characters (invisible commands such as line feed and tab) and 95 printable ones; no accented letters and no currency symbol other than $.

What is Unicode code point?

Unicode is the standard that gives one number to every character of the world's writing systems; that number is the code point, written as U+ followed by four or more hex digits (é = U+00E9, € = U+20AC). Code points run from 0 to 1,114,111 (U+10FFFF). The number is the character's identity, not the way it is stored: the same é is two bytes in UTF-8 (C3 A9) and a different two bytes in UTF-16 (00 E9). This tool shows the code point, not the bytes.

What is the difference between ASCII and Unicode?

ASCII is a single table of 128 characters covering the English alphabet, digits and basic punctuation. Unicode is the general table with room for more than a million numbers, covering everything from accented Latin letters to Arabic, Chinese and emoji. For the first 128 numbers the two are identical: H is 72 in both. The difference starts above that line: é has no ASCII code, its Unicode number is 233. When someone searches for "the ASCII code of é", what they need is really its Unicode code point.

ASCII is only 128 characters: why é, £ and € are "non-ASCII"

ASCII was defined in the 1960s for English and covers 128 codes, 0–127: 0–31 and 127 are control characters (line feed, tab, bell), 32 is the space, 48–57 are the digits, 65–90 the capital letters and 97–122 the small letters. Accented letters such as é or ñ and symbols such as £ or € are not in it. Charts sold as an "extended ASCII table" (128–255) are really later code pages such as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252, and they do not all agree: € is 128 in Windows-1252 and does not exist in ISO-8859-1.

This tool writes the Unicode code point of each character. From 0 to 127 Unicode and ASCII are identical, so for plain English text the result is the exact ASCII code. From 160 to 255 the code point matches ISO-8859-1, so é = 233 and £ = 163 look familiar. Above that, the result is only a Unicode number (€ = 8364), and the result line lists these characters separately; you will not find them in any ASCII table.

• A = 65, a = 97 (capital and small letter are exactly 32 apart)
• the digit 0 = 48 (not the value zero)
• space = 32, line feed = 10 (LF), tab = 9 (TAB)
• é = 233, ñ = 241, £ = 163, € = 8364 (outside ASCII)

Which notation to pick when

For homework, exams and checking against an ASCII table, use decimal; that is how the tables print the number. Hex is common in programming and memory dumps: C writes '\x48' and HTML writes H, both with the hex number. Unicode documents, font tools and emoji charts use U+ notation; pick U+ when you want to look a character up in a Unicode chart.

Note that hex here is the character's number written in hex, not the bytes in a file. The code point of é is U+00E9, yet a UTF-8 file stores it as two bytes, C3 A9. To see the bytes that actually sit in a file, use the text to hex converter on this site.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert ASCII codes to text?

Type the codes into the left box separated by spaces or commas, for example 72 101 108 108 111. The tool recognises them as codes and shows "Hello" on the right. If your codes are hex (48 65 6C), set "Code notation" to hexadecimal.

What is the ASCII code for é, ñ or £?

Standard ASCII has none of them; it stops at 127. The tool gives their Unicode code points instead: é = 233, è = 232, ñ = 241, ü = 252, £ = 163, € = 8364. For é, ñ and £ these match the ISO-8859-1 table, which is why some "extended ASCII" charts show the same numbers; € has a different number in every old code page.

Why do capital A and small a have different codes?

ASCII treats capital and small letters as separate characters: A = 65, a = 97. The gap is 32 for every letter, and old programs changed case by adding or subtracting 32. So when you work with codes, the case of a letter matters.

Is the text I type sent anywhere?

No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser; the text or codes you type never leave this page and are not saved.