1. ASCII

On both Windows/DOS and Unix systems, the 128 most commonly-used characters are each represented by a sequence of 7 bits known as the character’s ASCII code. They are traditionally stored as bytes (8 bits), i.e. the 7-bit ASCII code plus a leading zero. The characters include letters, digits, punctuation marks, and nonprintable control characters such as the backspace, tab, carriage return, etc.   Following are links to more information, including charts listing the 128 characters and numeric values of their ASCII codes.

• Standard ASCII chart (0 to 127) at Dean Engineering. Lists the characters and decimal representations of their binary ASCII codes. The control characters (with ASCII codes in the range 0 to 31) are listed by both standard abbreviations and brief descriptions.
• Standard ASCII chart on Gerry's home page. Lists the characters alongside both decimal and hexadecimal (base 16) representations of the binary ASCII codes.
• Webdesk - ASCII Table, at WebDesk. Chart followed by descriptions of the 32 control characters (listed by standard abbreviations in the table itself).
• ASCII introductory information (no chart yet) at Fist's Fabulous Fact Finder
• ASCII Character set, at the Robelle site. Brief introductory information about ASCII, together with charts listing the 128 characters together with decimal, hexadecimal (base 16), and octal (base 8) representations of the binary ASCII codes. Separate charts are given for the control characters (tab, backspace, etc.) and the printable characters (letters, digits, and punctuation marks), the latter of which are listed by brief descriptions in addition to the characters.themselves.
• decimal-to-ASCII chart at JimPrice.com. Lists the characters and decimal representations of their binary ASCII codes.
• ASCII Chart at U-1100 Systems and Applications. Lists the characters and decimal, hexadecimal (base 16), and octal (base 8) representations of the ASCII codes. The nonprintable control characters are referred to by standard abbreviations.
• Virtual Mike's ASCII chart, showing the binary ASCII codes themselves, at Micro AG Consulting.
• ASCII Control codes, showing how the nonprintable control characters (codes 0 to 31) can be generated using the keyboard, at Tampa Bay Interactive.

2. Unicode

Java uses Unicode, in which all the characters are represented by 16 bits (2 bytes). A total of 32,768 different characters are possible in Unicode, thereby allowing it to be a truly international character set. The first 128 Unicode characters are the same as the ASCII characters, but with an extra leading zero byte in front of them. Following are links to information about Unicode.

• The Unicode Standard at The Unicode Consorium
• Unicode 2.1 Character Charts
• Introduction to Unicode at the Earlham Computer Science Department's internationalization web pages
• Demystifying Unicode: An overview of the Unicode Standard by Andrea Vine, at the International Macintosh Users Group
• Unicode in Java
• Unicode/Language Issues at Logos Research Systems, Inc.
• The Unicode Standard at Zinc software

3. IBM PC Extended character set and IBM PC Scan codes

The IBM PC Extended characters are characters represented by binary codes corresponding to the numbers 128 to 255, whereas the standard ASCII characters are 0 to 127. The IBM Extended character codes are not the same as the Unicode representations of those same characters. The IBM PC Keyboard Scan codes are two-byte combinations, of which the first byte is null (zero). These too are different from the Unicode character codes.

• Some interesting information about the IBM PC Extended Character Set (ECS), at Robelle.
• Listings of ASCII characters, IBM Extended characters, and IBM PC Keyboard Scan codes, with some explanation, at JimPrice.com.
• A listing of the IBM Extended character set, plus some explanation, at Tampa Bay Interactive.
• Table ASCII-I and Table ASCII-I, listing both the standard ASCII character set (codes 0 to 127) and the IBM Extended character set (codes 228 to 255), at the website of Alain Courteau. Lists both decimal and hexadecimal (base 16) representations of the codes.

4. ISO Latin and ANSI

The ISO Latin character set includes the ASCII characters, with codes 0 to 127, plus 128 more characters with codes 128 to 255. The ISO Latin character set has become the first 256 characters of the Unicode character set. Yet another character set is the ANSI set, whose first 256 ANSI characters are the same as the ISO Latin characters, which are also the first 256 chararacters of the Unicode set. But the characters with codes higher than 255 are different between ANSI and Unicode.

• ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) Table, listing the characters and both decimal and hexadecimal representations of their codes, at Best Business Solutions.
• The HTML character set (ISO Latin) at R-Double-L
• Some information about the ANSI Character Set at Robelle.
• Listing ofANSI character codes and their corresponding Unicode values.

5. EBCDIC

EBCDIC, used on old IBM mainframes, is another representation of the more common characters such as letters, digits, etc., completely different from ASCII.

• EBCDIC Codes chart and other information, at PC Webopaedia
• EBCDIC in the Jargon File
• ASCII to EBCDIC to BINARY, information including code tables, at Room 42 Resource Center
• ASCII-EBCDIC chart at Natural Innovations
• Oracle7 Server SQL Language Reference Manual at the University of Missouri
• EBCDIC Character Set chart at BreakPoint Software

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