ASCII 140
Uppercase OE ligatureLowercase i with circumflex
ASCII 140 is Œ on Windows and î in old DOS.
Œ (Capital OE Ligature) is byte 140 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+0152. French treats it as required spelling, not decoration: Œuvre, Œdipe, and ŒUF on an all-caps menu. The catch is that ISO-8859-1 has neither Œ nor its lowercase œ, even though Latin-1 was meant to cover French. Windows-1252 slotted both into the 128–159 range, so a system that really uses strict Latin-1 can't store them, and a converter targeting it has to substitute OE or a question mark. In UTF-8 it's C5 92, which misreads as Å’. The lowercase œ is byte 156. The HTML entity is Œ.
î (Small I with Circumflex) is byte 140 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00EE. Windows-1252 has the ligature Œ at 140, so French DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns île into Œle and dîner into dŒner. Code page 850 kept î at 140 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 140 is Œ.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u0152\n"); /* UTF-8: C5 92 */unsigned char b = 140; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 140 0x8C */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 140 is î only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0x8C is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(140);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x8C is -116.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)140;unsigned char u = 140;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -116 140 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00EE\n"); /* C3 AE */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0140 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 0152 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+Shift+Q.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 152, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, O, E.
- Phone
- Tap Shift, then long-press O and pick Œ.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 140 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts î.
î is also ASCII 238 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Unicode treats œ as a letter of its own, not a ligature of o and e, so no normalization form splits it. When your code then drops everything outside ASCII, œ disappears whole. Replace it yourself before stripping accents, for example `s.replace('œ', 'oe').replace('Œ', 'OE')`, and give æ the same treatment.
No. Modern British spelling writes the two letters separately, as in manoeuvre and oesophagus, and American spelling usually drops the o altogether: maneuver, esophagus. The joined œ survives in English mainly in French phrases like hors d'œuvre, and even there oe is the everyday spelling.
The file is code page 437, where î is byte 140, and it's being shown as Windows-1252, where 140 is Œ. A capital ligature in the middle of maŒtre is hard to miss, so at least this mix-up is easy to spot. In PHP, `iconv('CP437', 'UTF-8', file_get_contents('old.txt'))` converts it.
Frequently Asked Questions
The file is code page 437, where î is byte 140, and it's being shown as Windows-1252, where 140 is Œ. A capital ligature in the middle of maŒtre is hard to miss, so at least this mix-up is easy to spot. In PHP, `iconv('CP437', 'UTF-8', file_get_contents('old.txt'))` converts it.