ASCII

The numbers returned by theCHAR functionin Excel come from ASCII.

The originalASCII specificationencodes 128 characters into numbers (see table below).

These include the numbers 0 to 9, lowercase a-z, uppercase A-Z, and punctuation.

Excel has two functions designed to work with this extended character set:UNICHARandUNICODE.

ASCII codes

The table below shows standard printable ASCII characters and codes.

The second table showsnon-printable control codes.