ASCII 175
MacronRight angle quotes
ASCII 175 is ¯ on Windows and » in old DOS.
¯ (Macron) is byte 175 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00AF. It's the accent that marks long vowels, as in Māori or Tōkyō, standing on its own as a spacing character. You'll know it from the arms of the shrug, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Paste that into Reddit or Discord and the backslash disappears, because \_ is an escaped underscore in Markdown, so the shrug loses an arm: ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Typing ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ keeps it, since the first two backslashes produce a literal one and the third escapes the underscore. The long vowels themselves, like ā, are separate precomposed letters that Windows-1252 doesn't have. In UTF-8 the macron is C2 AF, and the HTML entity is ¯.
» (Right Guillemet) is byte 175 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00BB. Its partner « is the byte before, 174. Windows-1252 has the macron ¯ at 175, so French DOS text read as Windows-1252 closes its quotes with a bar in the air: « oui » becomes ® oui ¯. Code page 850 kept » at 175 too.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 175 is ¯.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00AF\n"); /* UTF-8: C2 AF */unsigned char b = 175; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 175 0xAF */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 175 is » only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xAF is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(175);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xAF is -81.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)175;unsigned char u = 175;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -81 175 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u00BB\n"); /* C2 BB */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0175 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00AF and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+Shift+,.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type af, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, minus, caret.
- Phone
- Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 175 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ».
» is also ASCII 187 on Windows, which has the full guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Use the combining macron, U+0304, typed right after the x. That gives x̄, which has no single precomposed character of its own. In Word, type x, then 0304, then press Alt+X. In LaTeX it's `\bar{x}`, and in HTML `x̄` does the same.
UTF-8 text got read as Windows-1252 somewhere along the way. Each ¯ picks up a  from its lead byte C2, and ツ's three bytes turn into ツ. If the mangled version is already saved, you can reverse it in Python with `s.encode('cp1252').decode('utf-8')`, as long as nothing else changed the text in between.
The zero picks the table. Alt+175 reads DOS, where 175 is », the closing French quote, and Alt+0175 reads Windows-1252, where 175 is the macron ¯. So the Windows-table pair is Alt+0171 for « and Alt+0187 for », while the DOS pair is Alt+174 and Alt+175. For the arms of a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shrug, Alt+0175 is the one you want.
Frequently Asked Questions
The zero picks the table. Alt+175 reads DOS, where 175 is », the closing French quote, and Alt+0175 reads Windows-1252, where 175 is the macron ¯. So the Windows-table pair is Alt+0171 for « and Alt+0187 for », while the DOS pair is Alt+174 and Alt+175. For the arms of a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shrug, Alt+0175 is the one you want.