Character Set Simulator

Character Representation Click a character to see its code and stored bytes

BOARD VIEW

Text ASCII text · 16 bytes in UTF-8

Selected character ASCII + Unicode

Unicode code U+0041

Size in UTF-8 1 byte

Stored bytes · hexadecimal and binary

Standard ASCII: yes · decimal 65 · 7-bit 1000001

Standard ASCII map · 0–127 Click any character. Each cell shows the character and its decimal code.

ASCII is enough for this English example.

Choose World Languages or Symbols to show why a larger character set is needed.

Selected character

Code point U+0041

ASCII code 65

UTF-8 size 1 byte

Hex 41

Big idea ⌄

Characters are stored as numbers

A character set assigns a numerical code to each character. Those numerical values can then be represented in binary.

Character → code → bytes → binary

ASCII ⌄

Size 7 bits

2⁷ = 128 possible codes.

Coverage 0–127

English letters, digits, punctuation and control characters.

Why Unicode? ⌄

ASCII is too small for the world's writing systems and many modern symbols. Unicode provides a much larger shared set of code points.

中Chinese

مArabic

हDevanagari

日Japanese

✓Symbol

😀Emoji

Unicode and UTF-8 ⌄

Unicode assigns code points to characters. UTF-8 is an encoding that turns those code points into bytes. ASCII characters keep the same byte values in UTF-8.