ASCII 163
Pound signLowercase u with acute accent
ASCII 163 is £ on Windows and ú in old DOS.
£ (Pound Sign) is byte 163 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00A3. It's the symbol for the British pound, and Egypt writes its own pound as E£. Where it goes depends on the reader's locale, not on the currency. JavaScript's Intl.NumberFormat with currency GBP gives £1,234.56 for en-GB, 1.234,56 £ for de-DE and 1 234,56 £GB for fr-FR, so don't hard-code a £ prefix on a site that shows prices to other countries. Old DOS had the pound sign too, at 156. In UTF-8 it's C2 A3, and the HTML entity is £.
ú (Small U with Acute) is byte 163 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00FA. Windows-1252 has the pound sign £ at 163, so the two trade places across the tables: Spanish DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns música into m£sica, and a £ printed to a code page 437 console shows up as ú. Code page 850 kept ú at 163 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
</>
#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 163 is £.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00A3\n"); /* UTF-8: C2 A3 */unsigned char b = 163; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 163 0xA3 */return 0;}
Code Example
</>
#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 163 is ú only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xA3 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(163);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xA3 is -93.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)163;unsigned char u = 163;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -93 163 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00FA\n"); /* C3 BA */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0163 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+156, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00A3 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+3.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type a3, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, l, minus.
- Phone
- iPhone: tap 123, then #+= and tap £. Android (Gboard): tap ?123, then =\< and tap £.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 163 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ú.
ú is also ASCII 250 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
The server sent a text response without a charset in its Content-Type header, so requests fell back to ISO-8859-1 and decoded the UTF-8 bytes of £, C2 A3, as  and £. Set the encoding yourself before reading: `r.encoding = 'utf-8'`, then use r.text as usual. Better still, have the server send charset=utf-8 so every client gets it right.
The British 7-bit variant of ASCII put £ at 0x23, the byte where US ASCII has #, so a printer or terminal set to the UK character set printed £ where Americans expected #. The name overlaps too: in American English pound sign also means #, which makes the phrase ambiguous in search.
The program writes Windows-1252, where £ is byte 163, and the console reads code page 437 or 850, where 163 is ú, so £25 shows up as ú25. In Java, switch both sides to UTF-8: run `chcp 65001`, then wrap the output with `new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8")` before printing prices.
DOS keeps ú at byte 163, where Windows-1252 has the pound sign, so música turns into m£sica and tú into t£. A £ inside a Spanish word can't be anything else, which makes this mix-up easy to confirm. Decode the file as code page 850. Any real pound signs in it are stored at byte 156 and come back correctly too.
Frequently Asked Questions
The program writes Windows-1252, where £ is byte 163, and the console reads code page 437 or 850, where 163 is ú, so £25 shows up as ú25. In Java, switch both sides to UTF-8: run `chcp 65001`, then wrap the output with `new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8")` before printing prices.
DOS keeps ú at byte 163, where Windows-1252 has the pound sign, so música turns into m£sica and tú into t£. A £ inside a Spanish word can't be anything else, which makes this mix-up easy to confirm. Decode the file as code page 850. Any real pound signs in it are stored at byte 156 and come back correctly too.