ASCII 155
Single right angle quoteCent sign
ASCII 155 is › on Windows and ¢ in old DOS.
› (Single Right Angle Quote) is byte 155 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+203A. It closes the single guillemet pair that ‹ (byte 139) opens, and breadcrumbs use it as a separator: Home › Shoes › Running. Google's result pages display URLs the same way, which trips people up. Copy example.com › blog › post out of a search result and you have a label, not a link, so open the result and copy the real address. In CSS you can write it in a content property as '\203A'. Raw, the byte has a catch: in ISO-8859-1, 0x9B is CSI, the 8-bit form of the sequence that starts terminal commands, so dumping raw Windows-1252 text to a terminal that honors 8-bit controls can scramble the output. In UTF-8 it's E2 80 BA, garbled as ›. The HTML entity is ›.
¢ (Cent Sign) is byte 155 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00A2. Code page 850 swapped it out: byte 155 is ø there, and the Nordic code page 865 made the same change. So Danish or Norwegian DOS text decoded as code page 437 turns København into K¢benhavn, and read as Windows-1252, where 155 is the single right angle quote, it becomes K›benhavn. It opens the DOS currency row at 155 to 159, next to £, ¥, ₧ and ƒ.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 155 is ›.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u203A\n"); /* UTF-8: E2 80 BA */unsigned char b = 155; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 155 0x9B */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 155 is ¢ only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0x9B is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(155);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x9B is -101.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)155;unsigned char u = 155;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -101 155 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00A2\n"); /* C2 A2 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0155 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 203A and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+Shift+4.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 203a, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, period, greater-than.
- Phone
- Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 155 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. US PCs insert ¢, but PCs set to code page 850, common in Western Europe, insert ø.
¢ is also ASCII 162 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Wrap each separator in a span with aria-hidden="true" so a screen reader announces Home, Shoes, Running without the arrows in between. Putting › in CSS content doesn't reliably hide it, because browsers can pass generated content to assistive technology. Label the trail itself with aria-label="Breadcrumb" on its nav element.
It's Danish or Norwegian DOS text read as Windows-1252, which has › at the byte where the Nordic code pages keep ø. The neighbors confirm it: æ turns into ‘ and å into †, so blåbær would come out as bl†b‘r. Decode the file as code page 865 and all three letters come back at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which character a zero-less Alt code gives depends on the machine's DOS code page. US Windows uses code page 437, where 155 is ¢, but UK and most Western European setups use 850, which put ø at that spot. Alt+0162 gives ¢ on any Windows machine, because the zero switches to Windows-1252.
It's Danish or Norwegian DOS text read as Windows-1252, which has › at the byte where the Nordic code pages keep ø. The neighbors confirm it: æ turns into ‘ and å into †, so blåbær would come out as bl†b‘r. Decode the file as code page 865 and all three letters come back at once.