ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard used in telecommunication and computing. It assigns unique numerical values to letters, digits, punctuation marks, and other symbols, allowing computers to understand and process text data¹.

ASCII Control Characters (0-31 and 127)

The first 32 characters (0-31) and character 127 in the ASCII table are control characters. These characters are used to control peripherals such as printers and to manage text formatting. For example:

• NUL (0): Null character

• BEL (7): Bell, Alert

• BS (8): Backspace

• LF (10): Line Feed

• CR (13): Carriage Return

• ESC (27): Escape

• DEL (127): Delete¹²

ASCII Printable Characters (32-126)

Characters from 32 to 126 are printable characters, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few miscellaneous symbols. These characters are commonly used in text and can be found on most keyboards. For example: