ASCII

ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange

A widely used character encoding system first used in 1963.

ASCII (US-ASCII) uses a 7-bit code to represent various alphanumeric and special characters. It does this by representing each character by a seven bit binary number taken from a set of 128 possible combinations, which have the corresponding denary values of 0 through to 127.

As an example, below are some of the characters used in the ASCII system along with their ASCII code. We have placed the numerical denary equivalent in brackets after each code.

0 - code: 0110000 (48)
1 - code: 0110001 (49)
2 - code: 0110010 (50)
3 - code: 0110011 (51)
4 - code: 0110100 (52)
5 - code: 0110101 (53)
6 - code: 0110110 (54)
7 - code: 0110111 (55)
8 - code: 0111000 (56)
9 - code: 0111001 (57)
: - code: 0111010 (58)
; - code: 0111011 (59)
< - code: 0111100 (60)
= - code: 0111101 (61)
> - code: 0111110 (62)
? - code: 0111111 (63)
@ - code: 1000000 (64)
[ - code: 1011011 (91)
\ - code: 1011100 (92)
] - code: 1011101 (93)
^ - code: 1011110 (94)
_ - code: 1011111 (95)
` - code: 1100000 (96)
{ - code: 1111011 (123)
| - code: 1111100 (124)
} - code: 1111101 (125)
~ - code: 1111110 (126)

A - code: 1000001 (65)
B - code: 1000010 (66)
C - code: 1000011 (67)
D - code: 1000100 (68)
E - code: 1000101 (69)
F - code: 1000110 (70)
G - code: 1000111 (71)
H - code: 1001000 (72)
I - code: 1001001 (73)
J - code: 1001010 (74)
K - code: 1001011 (75)
L - code: 1001100 (76)
M - code: 1001101 (77)
N - code: 1001110 (78)
O - code: 1001111 (79)
P - code: 1010000 (80)
Q - code: 1010001 (81)
R - code: 1010010 (82)
S - code: 1010011 (83)
T - code: 1010100 (84)
U - code: 1010101 (85)
V - code: 1010110 (86)
W - code: 1010111 (87)
X - code: 1011000 (88)
Y - code: 1011001 (89)
Z - code: 1011010 (90)

a - code: 1100001 (97)
b - code: 1100010 (98)
c - code: 1100011 (99)
d - code: 1100100 (100)
e - code: 1100101 (101)
f - code: 1100110 (102)
g - code: 1100111 (103)
h - code: 1101000 (104)
i - code: 1101001 (105)
j - code: 1101010 (106)
k - code: 1101011 (107)
l - code: 1101100 (108)
m - code: 1101101 (109)
n - code: 1101110 (110)
o - code: 1101111 (111)
p - code: 1110000 (112)
q - code: 1110001 (113)
r - code: 1110010 (114)
s - code: 1110011 (115)
t - code: 1110100 (116)
u - code: 1110101 (117)
v - code: 1110110 (118)
w - code: 1110111 (119)
x - code: 1111000 (120)
y - code: 1111001 (121)
z - code: 1111010 (122)

There are also ASCII extensions in use which utilise eight bit codes, as opposed to seven bit codes, to represent International characters, in addition to the standard ASCII set.

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