Text to ASCII

ASCII was defined in the 1960s and assigns numbers 0 to 127 to unaccented Latin letters, digits, punctuation and control codes. Unicode later extended this to every writing system while keeping the same first 128 codes, which is why ASCII text is valid everywhere.

Accented letters are split by Unicode normalisation into a base letter and an accent mark, and the mark is dropped, so é, è, ê and ë all become e. Letters that are not built from a base letter and an accent are replaced with their usual spelling, and typographic punctuation is replaced with its plain equivalent.

Text in scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic or Greek, and most emoji, cannot be expressed in ASCII without a full transliteration system for each language. By default these characters are left out, and the tool tells you how many there were; choose Replace with ? to keep a placeholder in their place instead, so you can see where something was removed. For Cyrillic or Greek names, a language-specific romanisation standard gives better results than automatic conversion.

Computers store each character as a number. In ASCII, A is 65 (41 in hexadecimal, 01000001 in binary) and a space is 32. Characters beyond ASCII have larger numbers called Unicode code points, written like U+00E9 for é. The code views show these numbers for every character in your text, separated by spaces, and the code table lists each character with all its codes. This is the quickest way to spot a non-breaking space that breaks a script, a zero-width character hidden in a password, or a look-alike letter in a domain name.

Prepare file names and URL slugs that work everywhere — the Slug Generator does this for URLs specifically. Clean names and addresses before importing them into systems that only accept ASCII. Replace smart quotes in code snippets copied from word processors, where curly quotes cause syntax errors. Make text safe for SMS, where a single non-GSM character can halve the number of characters per message. All conversion happens on your device, so personal data stays private.