Non-printable ASCII characters list
By Flavio
Published · Updated
Tagged: Computer
A reference table of all the non-printable ASCII characters, listing their decimal and hexadecimal codes alongside names like NULL, BEL, TAB, and ESC.
Non-printable ASCII characters are the control codes. They sit outside the printable range (decimal 32 to 126). That means codes 0 to 31, plus DEL at 127.
Here is the full list:
| DEC | HEX | CHARACTER |
| 0 | 0 | NULL |
| 1 | 1 | START OF HEADING (SOH) |
| 2 | 2 | START OF TEXT (STX) |
| 3 | 3 | END OF TEXT (ETX) |
| 4 | 4 | END OF TRANSMISSION (EOT) |
| 5 | 5 | END OF QUERY (ENQ) |
| 6 | 6 | ACKNOWLEDGE (ACK) |
| 7 | 7 | BEEP (BEL) |
| 8 | 8 | BACKSPACE (BS) |
| 9 | 9 | HORIZONTAL TAB (HT) |
| 10 | A | LINE FEED (LF) |
| 11 | B | VERTICAL TAB (VT) |
| 12 | C | FF (FORM FEED) |
| 13 | D | CR (CARRIAGE RETURN) |
| 14 | E | SO (SHIFT OUT) |
| 15 | F | SI (SHIFT IN) |
| 16 | 10 | DATA LINK ESCAPE (DLE) |
| 17 | 11 | DEVICE CONTROL 1 (DC1) |
| 18 | 12 | DEVICE CONTROL 2 (DC2) |
| 19 | 13 | DEVICE CONTROL 3 (DC3) |
| 20 | 14 | DEVICE CONTROL 4 (DC4) |
| 21 | 15 | NEGATIVE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT (NAK) |
| 22 | 16 | SYNCHRONIZE (SYN) |
| 23 | 17 | END OF TRANSMISSION BLOCK (ETB) |
| 24 | 18 | CANCEL (CAN) |
| 25 | 19 | END OF MEDIUM (EM) |
| 26 | 1A | SUBSTITUTE (SUB) |
| 27 | 1B | ESCAPE (ESC) |
| 28 | 1C | FILE SEPARATOR (FS) RIGHT ARROW |
| 29 | 1D | GROUP SEPARATOR (GS) LEFT ARROW |
| 30 | 1E | RECORD SEPARATOR (RS) UP ARROW |
| 31 | 1F | UNIT SEPARATOR (US) DOWN ARROW |
| 127 | 7F | DELETE (DEL) |
For the characters you can type and print, see the printable ASCII characters list.
When you need to write these as \x or \u escapes in code, I built a free string escape tool that converts between literal text and escaped strings.
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