ASCII 147
Left double quoteLowercase o with circumflex
ASCII 147 is “ on Windows and ô in old DOS.
“ (Left Double Quote) is byte 147 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+201C. It opens a double-quoted phrase in English, “like this”, and ” (byte 148) closes it. Trouble starts when a command gets copied out of a blog post or a doc that converted the quotes. The shell doesn't treat “ as a quote at all, so git commit -m “fix login” hands git one argument starting with “fix and a second one, login”, which git rejects with a pathspec error. A one-word argument is worse, because it goes through silently with the curly marks still attached. If you're seeing “, that's the UTF-8 bytes E2 80 9C read as Windows-1252. The HTML entity is “.
ô (Small O with Circumflex) is byte 147 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00F4. Windows-1252 has the left double quote “ at 147, so French DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns hôtel into h“tel. Code page 850 kept ô at 147 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 147 is “.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u201C\n"); /* UTF-8: E2 80 9C */unsigned char b = 147; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 147 0x93 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 147 is ô only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0x93 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(147);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x93 is -109.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)147;unsigned char u = 147;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -109 147 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00F4\n"); /* C3 B4 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0147 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 201C and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+[. Option+Shift+G gives ˝ (double acute accent), which looks similar but is a different character.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 201c, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, less-than, quote.
- Phone
- iPhone: on the 123 keyboard, type " at the start of a word; Smart Punctuation (on by default) turns it into “. Android (Gboard): tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 147 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ô.
ô is also ASCII 244 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Excel only recognizes the straight " as a text delimiter, so a formula copied from a web page or a Word file with curly quotes gets rejected. Retype the quotes in the formula bar. For a sheet full of pasted formulas, use Find and Replace to swap “ and ” for " across the whole range in one go.
Simplified Chinese uses the same “ and ” characters, and CJK fonts draw them full-width to match Chinese text, so English passages set in that font inherit the wide marks. Put a Latin font before the Chinese one in your font stack so the quotes come from the Latin font, and mark English passages with lang="en".
Every “ in the middle of a word is an ô. DOS stores ô at byte 147, and Windows-1252 reads 147 as the opening double quote. Decode the source as code page 850 before running any cleanup that straightens curly quotes. Otherwise h“tel becomes h"tel, and that stray " will break CSV and JSON parsing further down the line.
Frequently Asked Questions
Every “ in the middle of a word is an ô. DOS stores ô at byte 147, and Windows-1252 reads 147 as the opening double quote. Decode the source as code page 850 before running any cleanup that straightens curly quotes. Otherwise h“tel becomes h"tel, and that stray " will break CSV and JSON parsing further down the line.