ASCII Text Converter

Of the numerous ways invented to represent text on a computer, none are more common or well-known than the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). This simple 7-bit code represents the English alphabet in both lower and upper case, the digits 0 to 9, and numerous punctuation marks. It's current form was standardized in 1986.

The range of 128 codes is divided into control characters and printable characters. Control characters are invisible symbols that represent commands rather than printable text (codes [0, 31] and 127). For example, 10 represents a new line, and 9 represents a "Tab", which advances the column position to the next tab stop. Although 32 is a space, which is invisible, it is considered to be a printable character nonetheless, since it behaves like a printable character (having the same behavior everywhere), and this allows fonts to define a printable glyph for the space (such as in programming, where whitespace is meaningful in some languages and it can be helpful to see it). The remaining codes are printable characters, which compose normal text. The letters you're reading now are printable characters! The glyph image and size for each character is determined by the font.

The ranges of characters were carefully chosen to make certain tricks possible. For example, upper and lower case letters differ by only the sixth bit. Text can be converted to lowercase by simply setting the sixth bit to 1 (calculate a bitwise or with 32), provided the text does not contain any of: [\]^_

The eighth bit in a byte is not used by ASCII. Using only 7 bits makes text 12.5% smaller, and allows for future extensions of the encoding when full bytes are used. Now, the eighth bit is used to represent the start of a UTF-8 multi-byte character from Unicode, allowing millions of characters.

Enter text in the box, and it will be encoded or decoded into ASCII character codes.