ASCII 9
Horizontal Tab (HT)
Control character
The Tab character (\t). Advances the cursor to the next tab stop.
Common uses & context
Decimal 9 (0x09) is Horizontal Tab, a whitespace code.The Tab character (\t). Advances the cursor to the next tab stop.
Whitespace codes are printable in the sense that they occupy horizontal or vertical space, but they carry no ink. That makes HT a frequent source of hard-to-see bugs: trailing spaces that break string equality, mixed tabs and spaces that confuse indentation-sensitive languages, or the wrong newline convention (LF vs CRLF) between operating systems. Its binary byte is 00001001.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 9 |
| Hexadecimal | 0x09 |
| Octal | 0011 |
| Binary | 00001001 |
| HTML numeric entity | 	 |
| URL encoding | %09 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0x09 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(9); // "HT"
9.toString(16); // "09"Python
chr(9) # control char HT
ord(chr(9)) # 9
hex(9) # '0x09'HTML
	 <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->Programming notes
- ▸Horizontal Tab (code 9) is invisible but significant — trailing or mixed whitespace silently breaks string equality and diffs.
- ▸Normalize line endings and trim whitespace explicitly rather than assuming input is clean.
- ▸Its byte value 9 (0x09) lets you match it precisely in a byte-level scan.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 9?
ASCII code 9 is Horizontal Tab (HT), a non-printing control/whitespace character. In hexadecimal it is 0x09 and in binary 00001001. It has no visible glyph — it controls formatting or hardware instead of drawing a symbol.
What is 0x09 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0x09 equals decimal 9, which is theHorizontal Tab control character (HT). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0x09 = 9) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 9 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(9); in Python use chr(9); in HTML use the numeric entity 	. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %09, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0x09.