Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition

Appendix E. ASCII Codes

Computers work using bits and bytes, essentially numbers. To represent character data in this numeric system, a standard established by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is prevalently used. ASCII assigns 7-bit numeric codes to Latin characters A–Z, a–z, numbers 0–9, some special keystrokes (for example, DEL), and special characters (such as backspace).

7 bits allow for 128 combinations of which the first 32 (0–31) are reserved as control characters used to interface with peripherals such as printers.

ASCII Table of Printable Characters

ASCII codes 32–127 are used for printable characters such as 0–9, A–Z, and a–z and a few others such as space. The table below shows the decimal and the hexadecimal ...