Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about the ASCII / Unicode Converter.
What is ASCII?
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numbers 0–127 to English letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters.
What is Unicode, and how is it different from ASCII?
Unicode is a much larger standard covering over a million code points, including every ASCII character plus symbols, emoji, and scripts from virtually every language. ASCII is effectively a subset of Unicode's first 128 code points.
What's the difference between decimal, hex, and binary code output?
They're the same numeric code point shown in different number bases — decimal (base 10), hexadecimal (base 16), and binary (base 2). The character 'A' is 65 in decimal, 41 in hex, and 1000001 in binary.
How do I convert codes back to text?
Switch to 'Codes → Text' mode, select the number format your codes use, and enter them separated by spaces — the tool converts each one back to its character.
Does this handle emoji and non-English characters?
Yes. The converter uses full Unicode code points, so emoji, accented letters, and characters from non-Latin scripts all convert correctly, not just the original 128 ASCII characters.
Why do some characters need more than one byte?
ASCII fits in 7 bits (one byte), but Unicode code points can go up to 0x10FFFF, requiring multiple bytes when encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16 — this tool shows the code point value itself, not its byte encoding.
What does 'code point' mean?
A code point is the unique number Unicode assigns to a character, independent of how it's stored in memory (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.).
Is a space character included?
Yes — the space character has decimal code 32 and is shown as '(space)' in the table for readability.
What happens if I enter an invalid code in decode mode?
The tool shows an error message naming the invalid token instead of guessing — codes must be valid numbers in the selected base within the Unicode range.
Is this converter free to use?
Yes, completely free with no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser.