What ASCII codes are
Every character on your keyboard has a number behind it — a character code that computers use to store and identify it. For the basic English characters, these are the ASCII codes: A is 65, a is 97, the digit 0 is 48, a space is 32. A text-to-ASCII converter reveals these numbers, turning each character of your text into its numeric code. It is a simple way to see the numbers that underlie the letters.
How the conversion works
The converter takes each character and outputs its numeric code in plain decimal. So "Hi" becomes 72 105 — H is 72, i is 105. Decoding does the reverse: it reads each number and maps it back to the character it represents. This one-to-one mapping between characters and numbers is one of the foundational ideas in computing, and seeing it directly with your own text makes the concept tangible.
Why convert text to character codes
The main uses are educational and practical. Students learning how computers represent text use it to understand character encoding. Programmers occasionally need the numeric code of a character for comparisons, sorting, or working with character ranges in code. It is also useful in puzzles and for understanding why certain characters sort the way they do — since sorting often compares these underlying codes, which is why uppercase letters (codes 65-90) sort before lowercase ones (97-122).
ASCII and beyond
The classic ASCII set covers the basic English characters with codes 0 to 127. Modern text goes far beyond that, using Unicode to represent every character in every language plus emoji, with much larger code numbers. This tool shows the actual code point of each character, whether it is a basic ASCII letter or a higher Unicode character, so accented letters and emoji produce their real, larger numbers. Everything is computed in your browser and never uploaded.
Privacy: your text never leaves the browser
All processing happens locally, on your own device. Your text is never sent to servers, which makes the tool safe even for confidential content. When you close the tab, nothing remains stored.