ASCII 41 — )

The right parenthesis (closing paren) completes a grouping started by the left parenthesis. Mismatched parentheses are among the most common syntax errors encountered in programming, which is why modern code editors provide bracket matching, highlighting, and auto-closing features. In mathematical notation, parentheses enforce evaluation order by overriding default operator precedence rules. In regular expressions, ')' closes a capture group. The requirement to correctly match opening and closing delimiters is fundamental to parsing theory, formal grammars, and compiler design.

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, Right Parenthesis is assigned code point 41 in decimal (0x29 hexadecimal, 051 octal, 00101001 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 Right Parenthesis works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.