Character code converter
Type or paste a character to see its code in every encoding, or type a code (65, U+20AC, E2 82 AC, é) to see the character.
Code point 65 is in ASCII, so UTF-8 stores it in a single byte.
What it means
Where is it in Unicode?
One code point at a time. Spaces and control characters show as U+0020 style codes. Some emoji are several code points joined together.
Every unit
That character in every encoding
Learn
Three things worth knowing
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32 apart
In ASCII a lowercase letter is its capital plus 32: A = 65, a = 97. Digits start at 48, so “7” is 55, not 7.
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From telegraphs to emoji
ASCII grew out of teleprinter codes. Unicode 1.0 came in 1991 with 7,000 characters; today it lists about 150,000, and UTF-8, sketched on a placemat by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992, carries them.
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One character, many bytes
“é” is one character but two UTF-8 bytes (C3 A9). Read those bytes as Latin-1 and you get “é”, the classic mojibake.
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Popular character conversions
Background
About character codes
Computers store text as numbers. ASCII (1963) numbered 128 characters: A is 65, a is 97, the digit 0 is 48. Unicode extends the list to over a million code points, written U+0041 for A and U+20AC for €, covering every script and the emoji.
A code point still has to be turned into bytes. UTF-8, used by almost every web page, keeps ASCII as one byte and spends two to four bytes on everything else; UTF-16, used inside Windows, Java and JavaScript, uses one or two 16-bit units.