ASCII 136
Circumflex accentLowercase e with circumflex
ASCII 136 is ˆ on Windows and ê in old DOS.
ˆ (Circumflex Accent) is byte 136 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+02C6. It's the accent by itself as a spacing character, and it's easy to mistake for the ASCII caret ^ (0x5E). Only the caret works as an operator, so 2ˆ3 in Excel or a ˆ in code is just an unknown character. It also won't sit on a letter: for a statistics hat like x̂ you need the combining circumflex U+0302 after the x. Its small tilde sibling ˜ is byte 152. In UTF-8 it's CB 86, garbled as ˆ. The HTML entity is ˆ.
ê (Small E with Circumflex) is byte 136 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00EA. Windows-1252 has the circumflex accent ˆ on its own at 136, so French DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns fête into fˆte, as if the accent slid off its letter. Code page 850 kept ê at 136 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 136 is ˆ.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u02C6\n"); /* UTF-8: CB 86 */unsigned char b = 136; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 136 0x88 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 136 is ê only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0x88 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(136);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x88 is -120.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)136;unsigned char u = 136;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -120 136 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00EA\n"); /* C3 AA */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0136 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 02C6 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+Shift+I.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2c6, then Space.
- Phone
- The ^ key types a similar but different character. Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 136 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ê.
ê is also ASCII 234 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Some PDFs draw the caret with the font's circumflex accent, so copying gives ˆ (U+02C6) instead of ^ and the pasted code breaks. The tilde often suffers the same way and arrives as ˜. Swap both back before running anything, for example in Python with `code.replace('\u02c6', '^').replace('\u02dc', '~')`.
Every ê in it lost its letter and kept only the accent. In code page 437 ê is byte 136, and Windows-1252 reads that byte as a lone circumflex. The file itself is fine, it just needs decoding as DOS text. In Node, the iconv-lite package does it: `iconv.decode(fs.readFileSync('old.txt'), 'cp437')`.
Frequently Asked Questions
Every ê in it lost its letter and kept only the accent. In code page 437 ê is byte 136, and Windows-1252 reads that byte as a lone circumflex. The file itself is fine, it just needs decoding as DOS text. In Node, the iconv-lite package does it: `iconv.decode(fs.readFileSync('old.txt'), 'cp437')`.