ASCII 162
Cent signLowercase o with acute accent
ASCII 162 is ¢ on Windows and ó in old DOS.
¢ (Cent Sign) is byte 162 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00A2. It marks US and Canadian cents and goes after the number, as in 99¢, while the dollar sign goes before: $0.99. Mixing the two conventions produces a real pricing error. A sign reading .99¢ means ninety-nine hundredths of a cent, less than a penny, not ninety-nine cents. Write 99¢ or $0.99, never a decimal point together with ¢. Old DOS had the cent sign too, at 155. In UTF-8 it's C2 A2, and the HTML entity is ¢.
ó (Small O with Acute) is byte 162 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00F3. Windows-1252 has the cent sign ¢ at 162, so Spanish DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns información into informaci¢n. Code page 850 kept ó at 162 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 162 is ¢.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00A2\n"); /* UTF-8: C2 A2 */unsigned char b = 162; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 162 0xA2 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 162 is ó only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xA2 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(162);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xA2 is -94.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)162;unsigned char u = 162;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -94 162 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00F3\n"); /* C3 B3 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0162 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+155, without the zero, types it too on US PCs. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00A2 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+4.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type a2, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, c, slash.
- Phone
- iPhone: open the 123 keyboard, long-press $ and pick ¢. Android (Gboard): tap ?123, then =\< and tap ¢.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 162 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ó.
ó is also ASCII 243 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Either is right, but never both at once. Put ¢ after the number, with no space, for amounts under a dollar: 50¢. Use $ with a decimal point for everything else: $0.50, $1.25. The classic mistake is .99¢ on a price tag, which literally means less than one cent.
The feed is saved as UTF-8, but its XML declaration or the server's header claims ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252, so readers split ¢ into  and ¢. Make the label match the bytes: start the file with `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>` and serve it with charset=utf-8. Leave the text itself alone, since it's already correct.
It isn't the usual form. Euro amounts under one euro are normally written as a decimal, €0.50, and in German-speaking countries ct after the number is common, as in 50 ct. Most readers take ¢ as American or Canadian cents, so on a euro price it looks out of place.
DOS keeps ó at byte 162, which Windows-1252 uses for the cent sign, so every word ending in -ción turns into -ci¢n. Those endings are everywhere in Spanish, so a single search for ci¢n tells you the whole file needs converting from code page 850, not a few typos fixed by hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
DOS keeps ó at byte 162, which Windows-1252 uses for the cent sign, so every word ending in -ción turns into -ci¢n. Those endings are everywhere in Spanish, so a single search for ci¢n tells you the whole file needs converting from code page 850, not a few typos fixed by hand.