Text to ASCII Converter
Find the number behind every character. Convert text to decimal ASCII codes, or Unicode code points for characters beyond ASCII, as a list or as HTML numeric entities ready to paste into markup.
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use Text to ASCII
- Type or paste text into the left box.
- Choose the format: codes separated by spaces or commas, one per line, or HTML entities.
- The codes appear instantly on the right.
- Copy or download the result.
Text to ASCII features
Decimal character codes
The familiar ASCII values: A is 65, a is 97, space is 32.
Unicode aware
Characters outside ASCII show their Unicode code point, such as 233 for é and 8364 for €.
HTML entities
Output such as Hi that displays correctly in any HTML page regardless of its encoding.
Four layouts
Spaces, commas, one per line or entities.
Emoji safe
Each emoji is one code point, not split into halves.
Runs locally
No upload.
When to use Text to ASCII
- Looking up the ASCII value of characters for programming exercises.
- Obfuscating an email address in HTML with numeric entities.
- Embedding special characters in HTML without encoding problems.
- Debugging which exact characters a string contains.
- Building arrays of character codes for code or microcontrollers.
Text to ASCII FAQ
What is ASCII?
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange assigns numbers 0–127 to English letters, digits, punctuation and control characters. It is the basis of nearly all later character sets.
What about characters that are not in ASCII?
They are shown as Unicode code points, which continue the same numbering beyond 127. The first 128 Unicode code points are identical to ASCII.
What are HTML numeric entities?
A way to write any character in HTML using its code point, such as © for ©. Browsers display the character even if the page’s encoding cannot represent it directly.
Is this the same as the bytes in a file?
For ASCII characters yes. Other characters occupy several bytes in UTF-8; use Text to Hex or Text to Binary to see the actual bytes.
How do I convert codes back to text?
Use the ASCII to Text converter.
The ASCII table and beyond
ASCII was designed in the early 1960s for teleprinters. Its 128 codes are arranged deliberately: digits 0–9 run from 48 to 57, capital letters from 65 to 90, and lower-case letters from 97 to 122. Upper and lower case differ by exactly 32, a single bit, which made case conversion trivial for early hardware.
The first 32 codes are control characters such as tab (9), line feed (10) and carriage return (13), which still shape how text files work. Code 127 is delete, a relic of punched tape, where punching every hole erased a character.
Unicode extends the idea to every writing system. Each character has a code point, written in decimal here; é is 233, the euro sign is 8364 and many emoji are above 128,000. Because the first 128 code points match ASCII, the two systems are compatible for English text.
Numeric character references in HTML use these same numbers. Writing é produces é on any page. They are handy for characters that are hard to type, and are sometimes used to make email addresses slightly harder for simple scrapers to harvest.