ASCII stands for something like American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and is a way of representing the alphabet, numerals, punctuation, some control characters, and some other things in (today) an 8 bit code. (IIRC, originally 5, 6, and 7 bits.) Eventually ASCII will presumably be superceded by UNICODE.

I currently have need for the code values for some of the control characters as represented in the "^ " form, so I'm copying some tables here.

Now that I see that "^_" is US (unit separator), I understand why Nedit shows a <us> for this character. I can probably now recognize other control characters when Nedit tries to display them.

There are many things I have not tried to cover here, including things like the characters in the full 8 bit code (is that official) that often include line drawing characters, or the (Microsoft??) "Code Page" approach which "localizes" the character set to include characters that are needed for other languages (like umlaut, accent, etc.).

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ASCII Tables

7 bit

A nice ASCII Chart of the lower half (i.e., 7 bits):

16's                          1's place
place  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   A   B   C   D   E   F

  0    NUL SOH STX ETX EOT ENQ ACK BEL BS  HT  LF  VT  FF  CR  SO  SI
  1    DLE DC1 DC2 DC3 DC4 NAK SYN ETB CAN EM  SUB ESC FS  GS  RS  US
  2    SP  !   "   #   $   %   &   '   (   )   *   +   ,   -   .   /
  3    0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   :   ;   <   =   >   ?
  4    @   A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O
  5    P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Y   Z   [   \   ]   ^   _
  6    `   a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o
  7    p   q   r   s   t   u   v   w   x   y   z   {   |   }   ~ DEL

"The ASCII code for CR is 0x0D character 'A' is 0x41."

"Control characters are abbreviated in capitols. Some useful ones are: BS (backspace), HT (horizontal tab), LF (line feed), VT (vertical tab), FF (formfeed), CR (carriage return), ESC (escape), SP (space). Actually, space is is printable character, not a control character."

Various things of ASCII-interest are available at: www.jimprice.com/jim-ask.htm This link did not work for me on 15 Nov 2003.

Control Characters (with ^ notation)

The ASCII Control Characters; by Adrian Wichello — the original page has some interesting notes about the origin or early usage of each of these control characters.

ABBREV	HEX	CTL	escape	name
NULL	00	^@		NULL
SOH	01	^A		start of heading
STX	02	^B		start of text
ETX	03	^C		end of text
EOT	04	^D		end of transmission
ENQ	05	^E		enquire
ACK	06	^F		acknowledge
BEL	07	^G		bell
BS	08	^H		backspace
HT	09	^I	\t	horizontal tab
LF	0A	^J	\n	linefeed
VT	0B	^K		vertical tab
FF	0C	^L	\f	formfeed
CR	0D	^M		carrage return
SO	0E	^N		shift out
SI	0F	^O		shift in
DLE	10	^P		data link escape
DC1	11	^Q		device control 1
DC2	12	^R		device control 2
DC3	13	^S		device control 3 (XOFF)
DC4	14	^T		device control 4
NAK	15	^U		negative acknowledge
SYN	16	^V		synchronous idle
ETB	17	^W		end of transmission block
CAN	18	^X		cancel
EM	19	^Y		end of medium
SUB	1A	^Z		substitute
ESC	1B	^[		escape
FS	1C	^\		file separator
GS	1D	^]		group separato
RS	1E	^^		record separator
US	1F	^_		unit separator
??	A0	??		non-breaking space
ALT	7D	}		ALT MODE
PRE	7E	~		PREFIX
DEL	7F	delete		delete

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• () RandyKramer - 15 Dec 2003
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