How Asciify Handles Standard and Extended ASCII Character Sets
Asciify separates its character reference into two switchable sets: Standard (the classic 0–127 ASCII range) and Extended (additional characters beyond 127, organized into named categories). A toggle on the page lets you move between them, and the same search box works across both — you can look up a character by name, code point, or glyph and copy its hex code or HTML entity from either set.
What each set contains
The two sets are not just "small" and "large" versions of the same list. They map to different technical scopes:
| Set | Scope | What you'll find |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 0–127 | Control characters, whitespace, punctuation & symbols, digits, uppercase and lowercase letters |
| Extended | Beyond 127 | Additional characters grouped into categories such as DOS, Compact, and Control |
The Standard set is the one most developers mean when they say "ASCII" — it's the 128-code-point range that is identical across virtually all modern encodings. The Extended set is where the site's own category labels matter, because "extended ASCII" is not a single standard: different historical systems (DOS code pages, for example) assigned different characters to the same high code points.
How the toggle works
Switching between sets changes which characters the reference displays, but it does not change how you interact with the page:
- Pick a set — use the Standard / Extended toggle to choose which range you're browsing.
- Browse or search — the category list updates to reflect the active set. In Standard you'll see the familiar groupings (Control, Whitespace, Punctuation & symbols, Numbers, Uppercase letters, Lowercase letters) with their counts. In Extended you'll see the extended categories.
- Jump to a character — the search field accepts a name, a code point, or the glyph itself, so you can go straight to a character without scrolling.
- Copy what you need — from either set you can copy the hex code or the HTML entity for the selected character.
The practical point: the toggle is a filter on the same reference, not a separate tool. Your search and copy workflow stays identical.
Why the distinction matters in practice
If you're writing code that must work across systems, the set you're reading from tells you how portable a character is.
- Standard characters are safe assumptions in almost any text context — they're the shared baseline.
- Extended characters depend on which extended set is in play. A code point that renders as one glyph in a DOS-era context may render differently elsewhere, so copying a hex value from the Extended set without checking the surrounding encoding can produce the wrong output.
For example, if you need a box-drawing character for a terminal UI, you'd look it up in the Extended set — but you'd want to confirm the target environment uses a compatible code page before hard-coding that value.
Privacy and hosting notes
Asciify states that it uses no accounts, no ads, and no tracking cookies, and that it keeps only anonymous, aggregated counts of pages and searches — no IP addresses and no profiles. The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which handles request delivery and security. Character names and code points come from the Unicode Standard, and emoji styles shown for comparison are attributed to their respective rights holders under the licenses listed on the site.