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Validate ASCII art to check character set compatibility and identify non-ASCII characters.
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   / \  / ___| / ___|_ _|_ _| \ \   / /_ _| (_) __| | __ _| |_ ___  _ __ 
  / _ \ \___ \| |    | | | |   \ \ / / _` | | |/ _` |/ _` | __/ _ \| '__|
 / ___ \ ___) | |___ | | | |    \ V / (_| | | | (_| | (_| | || (_) | |   
/_/   \_\____/ \____|___|___|    \_/ \__,_|_|_|\__,_|\__,_|\__\___/|_|
ASCII Validator
Welcome to our

ASCII Validator

- a free tool to validate your ASCII art and check character set compatibility. Paste your art to instantly identify non-ASCII characters with visual highlighting.

What is this tool?

ASCII Validator is a comprehensive text analysis tool that helps you check if your ASCII art uses only standard ASCII characters or includes extended characters that might cause compatibility issues. It provides real-time validation with visual highlighting and detects many special text formats.

How to use it

  1. Paste ASCII art into the Input tab (or click Upload File).
  2. Validation happens automatically as you type.
  3. Switch to the Validation tab to see highlighted results.
  4. Click on any colored character for details about its encoding.
  5. Use Send to to clean or further analyze your art.

What it detects

Character Sets

  • Pure ASCII - Maximum compatibility
  • CP437 - Classic DOS/ANSI art
  • Extended Latin - Western European
  • Unicode - Requires UTF-8
  • Control characters - May cause issues

Art Types

  • ANSI Art - Terminal color codes
  • Block Art - ░▒▓█ shading
  • Braille Art - Unicode dots
  • Kaomoji - Japanese emoticons
  • Emoji - Unicode emoji

Formatting

  • HTML Entities - & < etc.
  • BBCode - Forum tags
  • IRC Colors - mIRC formatting
  • Base64 - Encoded data

Security & Quality

  • Invisible chars - AI watermarks
  • Homoglyphs - Lookalike letters
  • BOM - Byte Order Mark
  • Mixed line endings - CRLF/LF

Privacy first

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your ASCII art is never sent to any server - all validation happens locally on your device.

Frequently Asked Questions

ASCII validation checks if your text contains only standard ASCII characters (codes 32-126) or includes extended characters from other encodings like CP437, Extended Latin, or Unicode. This is important because different systems, fonts, and terminals handle these character sets differently. Pure ASCII text is guaranteed to display correctly everywhere.

Invisible characters are Unicode characters that don't display visually but exist in the text. This includes zero-width spaces (U+200B), zero-width joiners (U+200D), and bidirectional markers. AI services often embed these as hidden watermarks to track generated content. This validator detects them so you can identify potentially watermarked text.

Homoglyphs are characters from different scripts that look identical to ASCII letters. For example, Cyrillic "а" (U+0430) looks exactly like Latin "a" (U+0061). These are commonly used in phishing attacks and spoofing. The validator detects these lookalike characters from Cyrillic, Greek, and other scripts to help identify potential security issues or text copied from suspicious sources.

ANSI art uses escape sequences (starting with ESC[) to control colors, styles, and cursor positioning in terminals. It was popular in BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) and .NFO files. The validator detects these sequences and shows what colors and formatting they represent. To view ANSI art properly, you need an ANSI-compatible terminal or viewer.

CP437 (Code Page 437) is the original IBM PC character set from the 1980s. It includes box-drawing characters (╔═╗║╚╝), block elements (░▒▓█), and various symbols not found in standard ASCII. It's the traditional character set for ANSI/ASCII art and is still widely used in terminal art and retro computing. The validator identifies CP437 characters separately from pure ASCII.

Braille art uses Unicode Braille patterns (U+2800 to U+28FF) to create images in text. Each Braille character is a 2x4 grid of dots, allowing for higher resolution than traditional ASCII art. It's commonly used by image-to-text converters because it can represent more detail. The validator detects when your text contains significant Braille patterns.

When copying text from websites or forums, formatting codes often get included. BBCode tags like [b]bold[/b] and HTML entities like & can clutter your ASCII art. The validator detects these so you know to clean them up before using the art. You can use the "Send to Text Cleaner" option to remove them automatically.

Yes, absolutely. All validation happens entirely in your web browser using JavaScript. Your text is never sent to any server. There are no accounts, no logins, and no tracking. You can even use this tool offline once the page is loaded. Your data stays on your device.