John's Corner

ASCII Character Table

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a 7 bit code that provides characters for upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation and a series of control codes that were originally designed for managing transmission via teletypewriters. There was also a 6 bit variant that used the printable 7 bit codes from 20H through to 5FH downshifted to the range 00H to 3FH (by subtracting 20H) to produce a 6 bit representation that covered capital letters, numbers and most common symbols.

An extended set of codes using 8 bits was later defined for use by personal computers covering accented characters, common symbols and graphics characters for producing simple lined drawings such as tables and ruler lines.

In more recent times, a number of different the extended sets have been defined that drop the graphics characters and replace them with a larger variety of accented letters and synbols. The most common set is shown here.