Appendix D: Table of ASCII Codes

To use this table, simply find the character or escape that you want the code for, and add the number on the left and the top.

Table D-1: Table of ASCII codes in decimal

	+0	+1	+2	+3	+4	+5	+6	+7
0	NUL	SOH	STX	ETX	EOT	ENQ	ACK	BEL
8	BS	HT	LF	VT	FF	CR	SO	SI
16	DLE	DC1	DC2	DC3	DC4	NAK	SYN	ETB
24	CAN	EM	SUB	ESC	FS	GS	RS	US
32		!	"	#	$	%	&	'
40	(	)	*	+	,	-	.	/
48	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
56	8	9	:	;	<	=	>	?
64	@	A	B	C	D	E	F	G
72	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O
80	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W
88	X	Y	Z	[	\	]	^	_
96	'	a	b	c	d	e	f	g
104	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o
112	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w
120	x	y	z	{	|	}	~	DEL

ASCII is actually being phased out in favor of an international standard known as Unicode, which allows you to display any character from any known writing system in the world. As you may have noticed, ASCII only has support for English characters. Unicode is much more complicated, however, because it requires more than one byte to encode a single character. There are several different methods for encoding Unicode characters. The most common is UTF-8 and UTF-32. UTF-8 is somewhat backwards-compatible with ASCII (it is stored the same for English characters, but expands into multiple byte for international characters). UTF-32 simply requires four bytes for each character rather than one. Windows® uses UTF-16, which is a variable-length encoding which requires at least 2 bytes per character, so it is not backwards-compatible with ASCII.

A good tutorial on internationalization issues, fonts, and Unicode is available in a great Article by Joe Spolsky, called "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)", available online at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html