ASCII Chessboard - Noooo 😱: Unicode
📆 2026-05-07 09:29
ASCII Chessboard, No HTML Required [1]
After the discussion on BBS [2], I felt this post was necessary.
The word "ASCII" is used because most people associate any text-based art with ASCII art - this is why I chose "ASCII Chessboard, No HTML Required" as the title of the post [1].
But the chess pieces themselves are Unicode symbols and the board is made from symbols from the Unicode Box Drawing subset.
What is ASCII
ASCII is a very small character set from the 1960s. It contains only 128 characters:
- uppercase letters A-Z
- lowercase letters a-z
- digits 0-9
- punctuation and symbols
- control characters (these are not displayed - they tell a computer or terminal to do something like: \n newline, \t tab, \r carriage return, \b backspace)
A real ASCII chessboard would look like:
What is UNICODE
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard. Its goal is to give every character from every writing system a unique number, so computers can display and exchange text consistently. It includes:
- accented letters
- greek letters
- cyrillic letters
- arabic letters
- chinese, japanese and korean symbols
- mathematical symbols
- emojis 😀
- chess pieces ♔
- thousands of other symbols
Example UNICODE characters:
- A = Unicode U+0041
- ♔ = Unicode U+2654
- 😀 = Unicode U+1F600
An important detail:
ASCII is actually part of Unicode. The first 128 Unicode code points are the original ASCII characters for compatibility. So:
- all ASCII text is valid Unicode
- but not all Unicode text is ASCII
I published this post because I wanted to explain why I chose ASCII: because "ASCII art" is the term used for any text visual output on the modern internet!