ASCII to Hex Converter

Converting ASCII to Hex

ASCII is one of the oldest character encodings, allowing for computers to represent binary numbers as text. Due to hardware limitations at the time of its inception, ASCII has only 128 code points, and only 95 of them are printable characters. For this reason, most modern computers use UTF-8, which represents the millions of code points covered by Unicode. However, UTF-8 has the same first 128 code points as ASCII, making UTF-8 an ASCII superset.

The steps to convert an ASCII character to a hex string are as follows:

1. Obtain the character that you want to convert
2. Find its corresponding decimal character using an ASCII table
3. Convert the decimal number to a two digit hex number
4. Repeat for any other characters

An ASCII table is provided below for your convenience.

Example: Encoding the letter "A" into hex

Using the ASCII table, the conversion is as follows:

"A" = 6510 = 4×16+1 = 4×161+1×160 = 4116

Alternate Encodings

ASCII is not the only encoding type used today. In its non-extended form, it only has the capability to represent 128 basic characters. To combat this, the UTF-8 encoding was created, capable of representing all 1,112,064 valid Unicode characters. Other, less popular encodings have been created, primarily for the purpose of better representing other script types, or as proprietary encodings for specific machines. This converter uses the UTF-8 encoding.

ASCII Table