ASCII / Text Converter

ASCII is the most fundamental character encoding in computing. Created in 1963, it maps 128 integers (0-127) to characters: 33 are non-printable control characters, 94 are printable (letters, digits, punctuation), and one is DEL. The design has elegant patterns: uppercase A-Z are 65-90, lowercase a-z are 97-122 (exactly 32 apart), and digits 0-9 are 48-57. This structure makes case conversion trivial — add or subtract 32.

The standard ASCII table divides into ranges: 0-31 (control), 32 (space), 33-47 (punctuation), 48-57 (digits), 58-64 (more punctuation), 65-90 (uppercase), 91-96 (brackets), 97-122 (lowercase), 123-126 (braces, tilde), 127 (DEL). Control characters have names like NUL, SOH, STX, ETX, EOT, ENQ, ACK, BEL, BS, TAB, LF, VT, FF, CR, SO, SI. LF (10) and CR (13) are still used for line endings.

To convert text to ASCII: each character maps to its code point. 'A' is 65, 'a' is 97, '0' is 48. To convert ASCII codes to text: use the inverse mapping. Decimal 72 is 'H', 101 is 'e', 108 is 'l', 108 is 'l', 111 is 'o' — spelling 'Hello'. Hex 0x48 is the same as decimal 72. This tool supports both directions and shows all representations (decimal, hex, octal, binary) in one place.

Extended ASCII (128-255) added accented characters and symbols but was inconsistent across systems — different 'code pages' defined different characters for the same byte values. Unicode solved this by assigning unique code points to every character. For standard ASCII (0-127), this tool is sufficient; for international text, use the Unicode Converter.