ASCII printable characters: letters, digits, punctuation.

Codes 32-126 (0x20 hex to 0x7E hex), known as the printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and some various symbols. In general there are 95 printable characters.

Code 32 (0x20 hex), the "space" character, designate the space between words, produced by the space bar of a keyboard. The space character is listed in the table that you can see below rather than in previous section because it is considered an invisible graphic (rather than a control character).

Code 127 (7F hex) can be described as the non-printable "delete" (DEL) control character. For this reason it was excluded from this chart; you can find it in the previous section's chart. More old versions of ASCII used the up arrow than the caret (0x5E hex) and the left arrow instead of the underscore (0x5F hex).

ASCII Table (Printable punctuation chars)

ASCII Table (Printable digits chars)

ASCII Table (Printable uppercase letters chars)

ASCII Table (Printable lowercase letters chars)

Use

The debut of the commercial use of ASCII was during 1963 as a 7-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX (TeletypeWriter eXchange) network. Previously TWX use the older version - 5-bit ITA2. It was also used by the competing Telex teleprinter system. Features such as the escape sequence were created and presented by Bob Bemer. Hugh McGregor Ross, the British colleague of Bemer helped to widely promote this work. Bemer said: "so much so that the code that was to become ASCII was first called the Bemer-Ross Code in Europe". "The father of ASCII" - that is how Bob Bemer was called because of his excellent hard work on ASCII.

On March 11, 1968, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson obliged all the computers that the US federal government purchased to support ASCII, stating: "I have also approved recommendations of the Secretary of Commerce regarding standards for recording the Standard Code for Information Interchange on magnetic tapes and paper tapes when they are used in computer operations. All computers and related equipment configurations brought into the Federal Government inventory on and after July 1, 1969, must have the capability to use the Standard Code for Information Interchange and the formats prescribed by the magnetic tape and paper tape standards when these media are used."

Until December 2007 ASCII was the most popular character encoding on the World Wide Web. In December 2007 it was exceeded by the new UTF-8, which is backward compatible with ASCII.