ASCII & Character Encoding Fundamentals

What is ASCII?

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns numeric values to letters, digits, and symbols. Each ASCII character is represented by a 7-bit number (0-127), making it perfect for hex encoding.

ASCII to Hex Conversion Table

Understanding UTF-8 Encoding

While ASCII handles basic English characters, UTF-8 extends support to all Unicode characters. When using our hex decoder, UTF-8 encoded characters may produce multi-byte hex sequences:

Character: © (copyright symbol)
UTF-8 Bytes: C2 A9
Hex String: C2A9

Character: 你 (Chinese character)
UTF-8 Bytes: E4 BD A0
Hex String: E4BDA0
          

Practical Applications

• URL Encoding: Special characters in URLs are hex-encoded (e.g., space = %20)
• HTML Entities: Characters like & become & in hex format
• Programming: String literals use hex escapes (\x41 for 'A')
• Data Storage: Binary data stored as hex for readability