Some time ago, when I was playing with binary formats, I was struggling a lot with ASCII values, specially when represented with hexadecimal numbers.
Around the same time, someone over at Mastodon (I don’t remember who it was, sorry) shared that the man page for ASCII had a neat table, including both decimal and hexidecimal representions. And it’s great, the only problem is that it’s at the bottom of the manual, making it less ideal to use it as a quick reference.
That’s when I decided to build a small commandline application to make the same!
The binary for the application is called ii, originally I wanted to call it ascii but that name was already taken.
By default, ii shows the ASCII table using hexadecimal values, I made it that way because I wanted to practice reading hexadecimal, and also the table itself is shorter.
% ii
2 3 4 5 6 7
-------------
0: 0 @ P ` p
1: ! 1 A Q a q
2: " 2 B R b r
3: # 3 C S c s
4: $ 4 D T d t
5: % 5 E U e u
6: & 6 F V f v
7: ' 7 G W g w
8: ( 8 H X h x
9: ) 9 I Y i y
A: * : J Z j z
B: + ; K [ k {
C: , < L \ l |
D: - = M ] m }
E: . > N ^ n ~
F: / ? O _ o DEL
Using the -d or --dec flag, it displays the ASCII table with decimal values.
% ii --dec
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120
---------------------------------
0: ( 2 < F P Z d n x
1: ) 3 = G Q [ e o y
2: * 4 > H R \ f p z
3: ! + 5 ? I S ] g q {
4: " , 6 @ J T ^ h r |
5: # - 7 A K U _ i s }
6: $ . 8 B L V ` j t ~
7: % / 9 C M W a k u DEL
8: & 0 : D N X b l v
9: ' 1 ; E O Y c m w
The implementation is just over a hundred lines of ANSI C code. It includes a Makefile, all you need to do to install it is:
% make && make install
By default, it installs the binary to /usr/local/bin/ but it can be easily overriden.
You can find the full source code on this repository at sr.ht.