ASCII table, American Standard Code Information Interchange, extended ascii codes, IBM Scan Codes, EBCDIC Codes
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ASCII table and description ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose. Below is the ASCII character table and this includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters. ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes and so the descriptions are somewhat obscure. If someone says they want your CV however in ASCII format, all this means is they want 'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold or underscoring - the raw format that any computer can understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file into their own applications without issues. Notepad.exe creates ASCII text, or in MS Word you can save a file as 'text only'

Extended ASCII Codes

128	129	130	131	132	133	134	135	136	137	138	139	140	141	142	143	144	145	146	147
Ç	ü	é	â	ä	à	å	ç	ê	ë	è	ï	î	ì	Ä	Å	É	æ	Æ	ô
148	149	150	151	152	153	154	155	156	157	158	159	160	161	162	163	164	165	166	167
ö	ò	û	ù	ÿ	Ö	Ü	ø	£	Ø	×	ƒ	á	í	ó	ú	ñ	Ñ	ª	º
168	169	170	171	172	173	174	175	176	177	178	179	180	181	182	183	184	185	186	187
¿	®	¬	½	¼	¡	«	»	_	_	_	¦	¦	Á	Â	À	©	¦	¦	+
188	189	190	191	192	193	194	195	196	197	198	199	200	201	202	203	204	205	206	207
+	¢	¥	+	+	-	-	+	-	+	ã	Ã	+	+	-	-	¦	-	+	¤
208	209	210	211	212	213	214	215	216	217	218	219	220	221	222	223	224	225	226	227
ð	Ð	Ê	Ë	È	i	Í	Î	Ï	+	+	_	_	¦	Ì	_	Ó	ß	Ô	Ò
228	229	230	231	232	233	234	235	236	237	238	239	240	241	242	243	244	245	246	247
õ	Õ	µ	þ	Þ	Ú	Û	Ù	ý	Ý	¯	´	­	±	_	¾	¶	§	÷	¸
248	249	250	251	252	253	254	255
°	¨	·	¹	³	²	_		fine

Extended ASCII Codes As people gradually required computers to understand additional characters and non-printing characters the ASCII set became restrictive. As with most technology, it took a while to get a single standard for these extra characters and hence there are few varying 'extended' sets. The most popular is presented below.

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IBM Scan Codes The following table is nothing to do with ASCII, but has been requested by a number of you out there. When a key on your keyboard is pressed, a code is sent which can be recognised by software. Programmers will find the most use for this table to map keys to actions for the function keys etc.

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EBCDIC Codes ASCII is not the only format in use out there. IBM adopted EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) developed for punched cards in the early 1960s and still uses it on mainframes today. It is probably the next most well known character set due to the proliferation of IBM mainframes. It comes in at least six slightly differing forms, so again here is the most common.

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