ASCII Converter

About ASCII Converter

ASCII Converter is a powerful free online tool that supports bidirectional conversion between ASCII characters and various number system representations and encoding formats. Convert between ASCII and Binary (base-2), Octal (base-8), Decimal (base-10), Hexadecimal (base-16), custom bases (2-36), byte representations, UTF-8, UTF-16, Base64, URL encoding, or HTML entity encoding. Perfect for programmers, developers, students, and anyone working with character encoding, data representation, web development, or digital systems.

ASCII Conversion Principles

1. What is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that uses 7 bits to represent 128 characters, including letters (both uppercase and lowercase), digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. ASCII codes range from 0 to 127, with extended ASCII supporting codes 0-255.

2. Number System Conversions

• Binary (Base-2): Uses digits 0 and 1. Each character's ASCII code is converted to binary representation.
• Octal (Base-8): Uses digits 0-7. Compact representation using 3 bits per digit.
• Decimal (Base-10): Standard numeric representation (0-255 for ASCII).
• Hexadecimal (Base-16): Uses digits 0-9 and letters A-F. Common in programming (0x prefix).
• Any Base (2-36): Custom base conversion using digits 0-9 and letters A-Z as needed.

3. Encoding Formats

• UTF-8: Variable-length character encoding that can represent any Unicode character. Most common encoding on the web.
• UTF-16: Uses 16-bit code units. Can represent characters as single or double code units.
• Base64: Binary-to-text encoding scheme. Converts binary data to ASCII string using 64 characters.
• URL Encoding: Percent-encoding format used in URLs. Special characters are encoded as %XX.
• HTML Entity: Character entity references for HTML. Uses &entity; or &#number; format.

4. Byte Representation

Bytes representation shows each character as its 8-bit binary value. For multi-character text, each character is converted separately and displayed as a sequence of bytes.

5. Conversion Process

• 1. Get the ASCII code of each character (0-255)
• 2. Convert the decimal ASCII code to the target number system
• 3. For text input, each character is converted separately
• 4. Results are displayed character by character or as a complete sequence

6. Common ASCII Codes

• 32: Space
• 48-57: Digits 0-9
• 65-90: Uppercase letters A-Z
• 97-122: Lowercase letters a-z
• 33-47, 58-64, 91-96, 123-126: Punctuation marks

7. Use Cases

• Programming: Understanding character encoding and data representation
• Debugging: Checking character codes in strings and data
• Education: Learning about number systems and character encoding
• Data processing: Converting between different representations
• Cryptography: Working with character encoding in security applications

Understanding ASCII and Number Systems

ASCII Character Set:

The ASCII character set includes 128 standard characters (0-127) and 128 extended characters (128-255). Standard ASCII includes control characters, printable characters, and basic symbols used in English text.

Number System Bases:

Different number systems use different bases: Binary (2), Octal (8), Decimal (10), Hexadecimal (16). Custom bases from 2 to 36 are also supported, using digits 0-9 and letters A-Z as needed.

Byte Representation:

A byte is 8 bits, representing values from 0 to 255. Each ASCII character corresponds to one byte. Multi-character text is represented as a sequence of bytes, one per character.