UTF-8 to ASCII

UTF-8 to ASCII – Convert Unicode Text to Plain ASCII

Some systems still only accept 7-bit ASCII: old mainframes, payment and banking files, SMS gateways, barcode printers, legacy CSV importers, e-mail headers, and many hardware devices. This tool converts any UTF-8 text into pure ASCII, and lets you decide what happens to each character outside the 0–127 range.

Five ways to handle non-ASCII characters

• Transliterate – replace characters with their closest ASCII look-alike: é → e, ß → ss, “smart quotes” → "straight quotes", — → -, … → ..., € → EUR, © → (c). Characters without an equivalent, such as emoji, are dropped.
• Escape as \uXXXX – keep all information by writing each character as a Unicode escape: café → caf\u00E9. Perfect for JavaScript, JSON, and Java source files that must stay ASCII.
• HTML entities – café → café, for HTML or XML documents that will be served with an ASCII charset.
• Remove – delete every non-ASCII character outright.
• Replace with ? – mimic what many legacy converters do, so you can see where characters will be lost.

Example

The sample text “Crème brûlée” costs €5 — naïve café becomes "Creme brulee" costs EUR5 - naive cafe with transliteration. In escape mode the same sentence starts with \u201CCr\u00E8me, which any JavaScript engine turns back into the original.

Why "UTF-8 to ASCII"?

UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII: the first 128 characters share the same single-byte codes, and everything else uses two to four bytes. Converting to ASCII therefore means dealing only with those multi-byte characters – plain English text passes through unchanged. After conversion, every character is guaranteed to be one byte with a value below 128, so the character count equals the byte count.

Common uses

Creating ASCII-only file names and URL slugs, cleaning product feeds for marketplaces that reject accents, preparing fixed-width files for banks (SEPA, ACH), sending SMS in the cheaper GSM-7 alphabet, and making log messages safe for terminals. To inspect which characters in a string are non-ASCII before converting, use Char to ASCII; to see their byte values, use the UTF-8 Converter.