ASCII 43 — +

The plus sign is the universal symbol for addition in mathematics and programming. In regular expressions, '+' matches one or more occurrences of the preceding element, making it a fundamental quantifier distinct from '*' (zero or more). In URL encoding, '+' represents the space character in application/x-www-form-urlencoded query strings. In diff output and version control, '+' marks added lines. In C and C++, '++' is the increment operator. Several programming languages overload '+' for string concatenation, which can cause subtle type coercion bugs.

Symbol characters in ASCII include mathematical operators, logical notation, and special-purpose marks that serve critical roles across programming, mathematics, and digital communication. Symbols are heavily context-dependent — the same character may act as an arithmetic operator in one language, a regex metacharacter in another, and a shell configuration flag in a third context. This contextual polyvalence makes symbols among the most functionally overloaded characters in computing, requiring careful attention to their meaning in each domain.

In the ASCII encoding table, Plus Sign is assigned code point 43 in decimal (0x2B hexadecimal, 053 octal, 00101011 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 Plus Sign works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.