ASCII 166
Broken barFeminine ordinal
ASCII 166 is ¦ on Windows and ª in old DOS.
¦ (Broken Bar) is byte 166 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00A6. It's a vertical line with a gap in the middle. Older PC keyboards printed the pipe key with that gap, and some fonts still draw | that way, so people go looking for the broken version and find this one. The two aren't interchangeable. A shell only pipes on | (0x7C), and a Markdown table only splits columns on it, so ls ¦ grep or a table built with ¦ comes out as literal text. The UK keyboard layout puts both on separate keys, which makes the mix-up easy. In UTF-8 it's C2 A6, and the HTML entity is ¦.
ª (Feminine Ordinal) is byte 166 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00AA. Windows-1252 has the broken bar ¦ at 166, so Spanish DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns 1.ª planta into 1.¦ planta. Code page 850 kept ª at 166 too. Its masculine partner º is the next byte, 167.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 166 is ¦.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00A6\n"); /* UTF-8: C2 A6 */unsigned char b = 166; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 166 0xA6 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 166 is ª only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xA6 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(166);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xA6 is -90.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)166;unsigned char u = 166;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -90 166 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00AA\n"); /* C2 AA */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0166 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00A6 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for "broken bar". Shift+\ gives | (vertical line), which looks similar but is a different character.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type a6, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, exclamation mark, caret.
- Phone
- The | key types a similar but different character. Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 166 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ª.
ª is also ASCII 170 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
The browser is reading a UTF-8 page as Windows-1252, often because the charset tag comes too late to count. The spec wants `<meta charset="utf-8">` inside the first 1024 bytes, and browsers can miss it past that point, so make it the first line in the head, ahead of any inline scripts or styles.
Windows-1252 is reading bytes a DOS program wrote, and the DOS ª sits exactly where Windows keeps ¦. º breaks the same way and turns into §, so Nº comes out as N§. For a single file, reopen it in any editor that lets you choose the encoding, pick code page 850, and save it back as UTF-8.
Frequently Asked Questions
Windows-1252 is reading bytes a DOS program wrote, and the DOS ª sits exactly where Windows keeps ¦. º breaks the same way and turns into §, so Nº comes out as N§. For a single file, reopen it in any editor that lets you choose the encoding, pick code page 850, and save it back as UTF-8.