ASCII – Computer alphabets

ASCII abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character-encoding scheme (the IANA prefers the name US-ASCII). ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters. ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when it was surpassed by UTF-8, which is fully backward compatible to ASCII.

ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services.

The ASCII character set comprises only codes 0–127. Codes 0–31 and 127 are non-printing control characters and are shown at the bottom of this page if you need to know them. ASCII characters are displayed here with a green background.

Codes 128–255, along with the ASCII set, make up the Extended ASCII or ISO Latin‑1 character set. This set is technically called ISO-8859‑1. These characters are displayed here with a yellow background. Codes 128–159 in the Latin‑1 set are non-printing control characters.

Characters 128–159 as shown on this chart do not belong to the Latin‑1 character set. They are part of the Windows-1252 character set and can be used with most Windows applications, including MS Word. These characters are displayed here with a blue background. They should NOT be used directly on web pages. If you want to use non-ASCII characters on a web page, use the proper numeric character reference or HTML entity. All of these characters may be used on a web page by specifying the numeric character reference or HTML entity.

At the end of the page you will find a small table that shows how Microsoft Word uses some of the ASCII control characters.

Hold your pointer over any character in the charts to see the numeric character reference and HTML entity if it has one. Remember that HTML entity names are case-sensitive, so use them as given here. A solid gray block ( ) indicates a character position that is not used.