Standard ASCII
Definition of Standard ASCII
Standard ASCII (ANSI X3.4-1986) is the final revision of the original 7-bit character encoding, mapping exactly 128 characters to codes 0-127. It was first published in 1963, revised in 1967 (adding lowercase letters), and finalized in 1986. The standard has not changed since.
Standard ASCII is a strict subset of every modern encoding: UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and all other extended ASCII variants preserve codes 0-127 identically. This means a pure-ASCII file is valid in any encoding. Browse the complete ASCII table, explore the history timeline, or check ASCII facts for trivia and lesser-known details.
Standard ASCII is a strict subset of every modern encoding: UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and all other extended ASCII variants preserve codes 0-127 identically. This means a pure-ASCII file is valid in any encoding. Browse the complete ASCII table, explore the history timeline, or check ASCII facts for trivia and lesser-known details.