asc

Utility to print the ASCII table or information about an individual character.

Written in Rust 2018.

Usage

Install using cargo install or use with cargo run.

Without any command line argument, the program prints the ASCII table, with character codes in decimal, hexadecimal, binary and octal, with the representation or name of the character. The values are output with tab separator, so that they can be easily parsed with sed, awk and the like.

Optionally takes one command line argument, which can be either:

• Decimal number from 0 to 127, like 65
• Hexadecimal number from 0 to 127, with the 0x prefix, like 0x41
• Binary number from 0 to 127, with the 0b prefix, like 0b01000001
• Octal number from 0 to 127, with the 0o prefix, like 0o101

When invoked with one argument, prints the same information as in the table, but only for the character that has the code specified, like this:

% cargo run --quiet -- 65
 65	41	01000001	101	A

Returns a standard UNIX exit code to the invoking shell: zero if a valid argument was supplied, 64 if there was a usage error.

Why ASCII?

This utility only deals with ASCII characters. Yes, they are legacy. Yes, I know about Unicode. You can extend it to handle any Unicode codepoint.

I was working with old file formats from pre-Unicode times, and using man ascii was not suitable for a quick reference. Also, ascii is handy, but I wanted to do something in Rust.

License

MIT License.