ASCII 34 — "

The double quotation mark (or straight quote) delimits strings in most programming languages including C, Java, JavaScript, Python, and many others. In HTML, double quotes enclose attribute values by convention. The ASCII straight quote differs from typographic curly quotes (Unicode characters) preferred in published text. In JSON, strings must be enclosed in double quotes specifically — single quotes are invalid. Shell scripting uses double quotes to allow variable interpolation while preserving spaces and preventing word splitting in arguments.

Punctuation marks serve as the structural scaffolding of written language, delineating sentences, clauses, and phrases while conveying emphasis and grouping. In programming, these same characters gain powerful additional roles as operators, statement terminators, delimiters, and syntactic markers that compilers and interpreters rely upon. This dual significance in both natural language and code syntax means punctuation characters carry outsized functional importance relative to their small count in the ASCII character set.

In the ASCII encoding table, Double Quote is assigned code point 34 in decimal (0x22 hexadecimal, 042 octal, 00100010 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Double Quote works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.