ASCII Converter

Our free online ASCII Converter provides real-time text conversion to ASCII codes and ASCII art. Convert text to decimal codes, codes back to text, or create ASCII art instantly. Perfect for developers, designers, and educators working with character encoding.

Privacy Guaranteed: Your text is processed locally in your browser. Nothing is stored or sent to any server.

How to Use the ASCII Converter

Convert text to ASCII codes or create ASCII art in three simple steps:

Select Conversion Type

Choose your desired conversion from the tabs at the top of the tool.

Enter Your Content

Type or paste your text. For ASCII codes, enter decimal values separated by spaces.

Convert and Use

Click “Convert” to process your input. Use the “Copy” button to get the results.

Why ASCII Conversion Matters

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is fundamental to digital communication and computing:

Programming

Essential for character encoding in programming languages and data transmission protocols.

Data Representation

Standardizes text representation across different systems and platforms for reliable communication.

Creative Applications

Used in retro-style designs, terminal interfaces, and digital art creations.

Understanding ASCII Encoding

ASCII is the most fundamental character encoding standard. Originally developed from telegraph codes, it maps 128 characters—English letters, numerals, punctuation, and control codes—to 7-bit integers.

  • Control Characters (0-31): Non-printable codes for device control.
  • Printable Characters (32-126): The characters you see on screen.
  • Extended ASCII (128-255): Unofficial extensions for additional characters.

Common ASCII Code Ranges

Character Type
Decimal Range
Example
Numbers (0-9)
48-57
‘0’ = 48
Uppercase Letters (A-Z)
65-90
‘A’ = 65
Lowercase Letters (a-z)
97-122
‘a’ = 97
Special Characters
32-47, 58-64, 91-96, 123-126
‘!’ = 33

ASCII in Practice: Real-World Examples

While often working behind the scenes, ASCII is present in many areas of modern technology. Understanding where it’s used can help you debug issues and work more effectively with data.

Web Development (HTTP Headers)

When your browser requests a webpage, it sends headers to the server that are encoded in ASCII. These headers contain information like the browser type and accepted content formats.

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
Accept-Language: en-US

Programming Source Code

Most programming languages are designed to be written using ASCII characters. The entire structure of a program, from keywords like if and while to variable names and comments, is typically ASCII text.

#include 

int main() {
    // This is an ASCII comment
    char greeting[] = {72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 33, 0}; // "Hello!"
    std::cout << greeting << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Beyond Decimal: ASCII in Binary and Hexadecimal

While we often see ASCII codes as decimal numbers, computers store them as binary. Hexadecimal is a human-readable shorthand for binary.

Character
Decimal
Hexadecimal
Binary
A
65
41
01000001
a
97
61
01100001
5
53
35
00110101
$
36
24
00100100

Frequently Asked Questions

ASCII is a character encoding standard that uses numeric codes to represent text in computers, including letters, digits, and punctuation.

ASCII is limited to 128 characters, primarily for English. Unicode supports over 140,000 characters from most world languages. UTF-8 (the most common Unicode format) is backward-compatible with ASCII.

ASCII remains fundamental for programming syntax, configuration files, network protocols (like HTTP headers), command-line interfaces, and legacy systems.

Absolutely. All conversions happen in your browser. Your data is never sent to our servers, ensuring 100% privacy and security.