Text to ASCII

What the Text to ASCII tool does

This turns your text into ASCII codes, the numbers that stand for each character. Type or paste your text, press Convert, and copy or download the result. Take the word "Hi": the capital H is ASCII code 72 and the lowercase i is 105, so those are the two numbers you get back. Every character you type has a number like this, and the tool simply looks each one up.

It runs in your browser, so nothing you enter is uploaded.

How to use it

1. Enter your text. Type or paste it into the box.
2. Press Convert. The ASCII code for each character appears, ready to Copy or Download.

What ASCII is

ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is one of the oldest and most important agreements in computing: a simple table that gives every basic character a number. It runs from 0 to 127, and once you know a few of its landmarks it starts to make sense. The capital letters A to Z are 65 to 90, so A is 65, B is 66, and so on. The lowercase letters a to z sit a little higher, at 97 to 122. The digits 0 to 9 are 48 to 57, and a plain space is 32.

The numbers below 32 are not printable characters at all but old control signals, like the one that means "new line." Everything from 32 upward is the visible stuff: letters, digits, punctuation. This little table is the bedrock that text on computers was built on, and it still is. The modern system almost everything uses today, UTF-8, was deliberately designed so that its first 128 characters are exactly these same ASCII codes, which is why ASCII has quietly survived for sixty years.

Going the other way

If you have a string of ASCII codes and want the text back, that is the opposite job, and the ASCII to Text tool handles it. This one goes from characters to numbers; that one goes from numbers to characters.

Questions people ask

What is the ASCII code for a particular letter?

Type it in and convert to see it. As a few anchors: A is 65, a is 97, the digit 0 is 48, and a space is 32. Capitals and lowercase letters have different codes.

Why will it not handle an emoji or an accented letter?

Because ASCII only covers 128 characters, the basic English set, so anything outside that, like é or an emoji, has no ASCII code. For those, the Text to Binary or ASCII to Hex tools work, since they can use fuller character encodings.

How do I turn ASCII codes back into text?

Use the ASCII to Text tool, which reverses this one, taking the code numbers and giving you the characters.

References

1. Cerf, V. (1969). RFC 20: ASCII format for Network Interchange. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc20