ASCII Character Set

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Although not in use much any more, this table of ASCII characters was an indispensable tool for software programmers in the olden DOS days. The ones above 127 used to be referred to as the escape sequence characters. Tables, frames, and entire drawings were constructed using them. Nowadays, if you need the characters, you simply launch the Character Map applet provided with Windows (or the equivalent Mac applet).

To generate any of the ASCII characters here, hold down the Alt key and quickly type the number on the Numeric Keypad (not the number across the top of the keyboard). The proper characters do not display in all fonts. This table uses the Arial font, but it also works for Times New Roman and Tahoma. Verdana does not seem to work for all characters. Characters 0 through 31 has some special commands used to control things like linefeed, cursor direction, form feed and space. A list is provided after the ASCII table.

Posted on July 12, 2004