1. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and now the non-printing characters are rarely used for their original purpose. Below is the ASCII character table and this includes descriptions of the first 32 non-printing characters. ASCII was actually designed for use with teletypes and so the descriptions are somewhat obscure. If someone says they want your CV however in ASCII format, all this means is they want 'plain' text with no formatting such as tabs, bold or underscoring - the raw format that any computer can understand. This is usually so they can easily import the file into their own applications without issues. Notepad.exe creates ASCII text, or in MS Word you can save a file as 'text only'

2. Extended ASCII Codes As people gradually required computers to understand additional characters and non-printing characters the ASCII set became restrictive. As with most technology, it took a while to get a single standard for these extra characters and hence there are few varying 'extended' sets. The most popular is presented below.

3. Table of ASCII codes Dec Hx Char 0 0 NUL (NULl)
SOH (Start Of Heading)
STX (Start of TeXt)
ETX (End of TeXt)
EOT (End of Transmission)
ENQ (enquiry)
ACK (acknowledge)
BEL (bell)
BS (backspace)
TAB (horizontal tab)
10 A LF (line feed)
11 B VT (vertical tab)
12 C FF (form feed)
13 D CR (carriage return)
14 E SO (shift out)
15 F SI (shift in)
DLE (data link escape)
DC1 (device control 1)
DC2 (device control 2)
DC3 (device control 3)
DC4 (device control 4)
NAK (negative acknowledge)
SYN (synchronous idle)
ETB (end of trans. block)
CAN (cancel)
EM (end of medium)
26 1A SUB (substitute)
27 1B ESC (escape)
28 1C FS (file separator)
29 1D GS (group separator)
30 1E RS (record separator)
31 1F US (unit separator)
Dec Hx Char
Space ! “ # $ %
& ′ ( )
42 2A *
43 2B +
44 2C ,
45 2D -
46 2E .
47 2F /
58 3A :
59 3B ;
60 3C <
61 3D =
62 3E >
63 3F ?
Dec Hx Char @ A B C D E F G H I
74 4A J
75 4B K
76 4C L
77 4D M
78 4E N
79 4F O P Q R S T U V W X Y
90 5A Z
91 5B [
92 5C \
93 5D ]
94 5E ^
95 5F _
Dec Hx Char ` a b c d e f g h i
A j
B k
C l
D m
E n
F o p q r s t u v w x y
A z
B {
C |
D }
E ~
F DEL

4. LATIN1 Character Set

10. U N I C O D E A R B