optools/ref/ascii/ascii.adoc

= ASCII Character Reference
Brent Saner <r00t@square-r00t.net>
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This document attempts to categorize and give reference 
for all ASCII codes and their various representations.
I primarily used http://www.profdavis.net/ASCII_table.pdf[this PDF^] and 
http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html[this website^] as references.

== How to Use This Document

=== How to Render It

The document is written in https://asciidoc.org/[AsciiDoc^]
(and rendered with https://asciidoctor.org/[AsciiDoctor^]).
The most up-to-date AsciiDoc code can be found at
https://git.square-r00t.net/OpTools/tree/ref/ascii[my OpTools repo^].
You may see some things that don't quite match the AsciiDoc spec in the source; 
that's because they're probably AsciiDoctor-specific extensions.

You can render it via `asciidoctor -n ascii.adoc`. By default it will render HTML5.
You can also render to PDF via `asciidoctor-pdf -n ascii.adoc`.

=== How to Read It

Each section under <<reference_tables, Reference Tables>> has information about 
the following tables. Each table thereafter has the following columns in order:

*DEC*:: The decimal representation of the character (i.e. what would be returned in Python's `ord()`).
*OCT*:: The octal representation of the character.
*HEX*:: The hexadecimal representation of the character.
*BIN*:: The binary representation of the character.
*HTML*:: The HTML number representation of the character.
*ESCAPE*:: The HTML escape of the character (if it has one), e.g. `&amp;quot;`.
(Does not include the full set of https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref[HTML5 characters^], 
only characters that should be escaped.)
*LIT*:: The literal character (if it is unprintable, its symbol name will be given instead in _italics_).
*DESC*:: A description of the character.

If any fields are not relevant, possible, defined, printable, etc. then they will be "N/A" (without the quotes).

////
TODO
You will also find an <<index, Index>> to help you find a certain character more quickly, as well as reverse-lookup.

In this index:

* the literal character is in regular style
* the decimal is a regular style positive integer
* the octal is in *bold* 
* the hex is in _italics_
* the HTML is in *_bold italics_*
* the binary is in `fixed-width/monospace`
* the HTML Escape (if it has one) is in `*bold fixed-width*`
////

== Reference Tables

ASCII ("**A**merican **S**tandard **C**ode for **I**nformation **I**nterchange") is 
a series of 7-bit sequences in which each single bit represents a character.

The tables given provide the information in 8 bits (256 characters total) per 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1[ISO 8859-1^], commonly referred to 
as the `Latin-1` or `latin1` character set, in order to uniformly include the
extended ASCII set.

You may see some characters link to a https://en.wikipedia.org/[Wikipedia^] article in their description.
This is typically done because the symbol/character is known by multiple different names or they're uncommon.

You can, of course, copy the character directly from this page into your clipboard (if your OS supports it).

=== ASCII Control Characters
(DEC 0-31, OCT **000**-**037**, HEX __00__-__1f__)

These characters represent control codes -- characters that alter the environment. 
They're primarily used these days for *nix (UNIX, BSD, GNU/Linux) terminals. 
Historically they have been used for things like line printers.

You may see things in `fixed-width` in the description; these are 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_flow_control[flow controls^] (commonly 
used on e.g. RS-232).

.Control Characters
include::tables/_hdr.adoc[]
include::tables/ctrl.adoc[]
|===

=== ASCII Printable Characters
(DEC 32-127, OCT **040**-**177**, HEX __20__-__7f__)

.Printable Characters
include::tables/_hdr.adoc[]
include::tables/print.adoc[]
|===

=== Extended ASCII Characters
(DEC 128-255, OCT **200**-**377**, HEX __80__-__ff__)

.Extended Characters
include::tables/_hdr.adoc[]
include::tables/extend.adoc[]
|===

=== Combined Table (All Characters/Codes)
(DEC 0-255, OCT **000**-**377**, HEX __00__-__ff__)

The following table is a combined table of the previous three sections for ease 
of reference.

.All Characters
include::tables/_hdr.adoc[]
include::tables/ctrl.adoc[]
include::tables/print.adoc[]
include::tables/extend.adoc[]
|===