ASCII Table

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort.

Below is the complete 7-bit ASCII character table and decimal equivalent.

Standard and Control Characters

ASCII was originally created in 1963 as a standard for sending text over phone lines, and first used with teleprinters. It consists of 128 characters (7-bit). The first 32 characters (0-31) and 127 (DEL) are actually commands historically used to control the teleprinter, such as the well-known carriage return (13) and line feed (10). For this reason they are referred to as control characters, control codes, or non-printable characters.

The remainder of the 128 characters are the visible, printable characters most people would equate to plain text. These make up the ASCII Standard Character Set and include upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and basic punctuation.

"Save as ASCII Format"

Today, non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purposes. However, if someone says they want your CV or resume in "ASCII format," all this means is they want 'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold, or underscoring—the raw format that any computer can understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file into their own applications without issues. You can create ASCII text using Notepad.exe, or by saving an MS Word document as 'Text Only'.

Below is the detailed table with octal, binary, HTML entities, and descriptions added. HTML entities are friendly names that are easier to remember than the ASCII code.