PrintableString

A PrintableString is a restricted character string type in the ASN.1 notation. It is used to describe data that consists only of a specific printable subset of the ASCII character set.

According to the ASN.1 Specification of basic notation,^[1] the character set of PrintableString can be expressed as:

Name	Graphic	ASCII Code (DEC)	ASCII Code (HEX)
Latin capital letters	A,B, ... Z	65 - 90	41 - 5A
Latin small letters	a,b, ... z	97 - 122	61 - 7A
Numbers	0,1, ... 9	48 - 57	30 - 39
SPACE	(space)	32	20
APOSTROPHE	'	39	27
LEFT PARENTHESIS	(	40	28
RIGHT PARENTHESIS	)	41	29
PLUS SIGN	+	43	2B
COMMA	,	44	2C
HYPHEN-MINUS	-	45	2D
FULL STOP	.	46	2E
SOLIDUS	/	47	2F
COLON	:	58	3A
EQUALS SIGN	=	61	3D
QUESTION MARK	?	63	3F

The PrintableString definition does not include the at sign (@) or ampersand (&). This sometimes causes problems for naive implementers who attempt to put an SMTP email address into an X.509 digital certificate Distinguished Name.

The PrintableString definition does not include asterisk (*) which means it must not be used to represent a wildcard in an X.509 digital certificate Distinguished Name.

See also

• The X.690 encoding standard for ASN.1
• IA5String