ASCII & Unicode Converter

Every character has a number behind it, and this tool shows you what it is. Paste text and get a table with the decimal, hex, binary and Unicode code point for each character, or a plain list of decimal codes or U+ codes. It also works backwards: type codes like 72, 0x48 or U+0048 and get the characters.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text.
2. Choose a table, decimal codes or Unicode code points.
3. To go the other way, pick codes to text and enter the numbers.
4. Copy the result.

When it helps

• Finding the code for a symbol or control character.
• Debugging text that shows odd characters.
• Learning how ASCII relates to Unicode.
• Building a string from numeric codes.

Good to know

• Plain ASCII covers 0 to 127. Everything above that belongs to the wider Unicode set.
• An emoji is one code point even though it takes several bytes to store.
• Space is 32 and a new line is 10, which is worth knowing when text looks odd.

ASCII, Unicode and code points

ASCII is a 7-bit table of 128 characters from 1963: English letters, digits, punctuation and some control codes. Unicode extends it to cover over 140,000 characters in most of the world's writing systems, and keeps ASCII as its first 128 entries. Each character has a code point, written like U+0041 for A.

That's why the letter A is 65 in decimal, 41 in hex and 01000001 in binary, in every modern system. The tool shows all of them side by side so you can see how one value can be written in different bases.

Worked example: control characters

Paste a line of text with a tab in it and choose the table view. The tab shows as code 9, a new line as 10, and a carriage return as 13. Those invisible characters often cause trouble in data files: a line ending of 13 followed by 10 is used by Windows, while 10 alone is used by Unix.

If a file looks fine but a program rejects it, a table like this can reveal a stray non-breaking space, which is 160, or a zero-width character that you can't see at all.

Decoding numbers

Going the other way, enter codes such as 72 101 108 108 111 and choose Codes to text: you'll get Hello. Hex values written 0x48, and Unicode notation such as U+1F600, also work, the latter giving an emoji.

This is useful for puzzles and for building strings in code when a character is awkward to type. Be careful with values above 127, because their meaning depends on the encoding used elsewhere.

Why this still matters

Almost every system interprets text through these numbers, from file formats to web addresses. When characters appear wrongly, as in "café" instead of "café", the cause is usually text read with the wrong encoding, and a code table helps you spot what went wrong.

For learning, comparing uppercase and lowercase is revealing: A is 65 and a is 97, a difference of 32, which is one bit. That design lets programs change case with a single operation.

Questions