Can I drop the ^ from Ê in French all-caps headings?

Not safely, because some French words differ only by that accent. FORÊT is a forest while FORET is a drill bit, and PECHEUR without its accent could be PÊCHEUR, a fisher, or PÉCHEUR, a sinner. Keep Ê in capitals exactly as you would in lowercase.

Why does Vietnamese Ế break in Windows-1252 text?

Windows-1252 has the plain Ê but none of the toned forms Vietnamese uses constantly, like Ế (U+1EBE) and Ệ (U+1EC6), so converting to it turns them into question marks. Keep Vietnamese in UTF-8, and normalize to NFC as well, since some input methods type Ê plus a separate combining tone mark, which looks identical but won't match the precomposed letter in a search.

ASCII 202

Uppercase E with circumflexDouble box T-junction pointing up

ASCII 202 is Ê on Windows and ╩ in old DOS.

Ê (Capital E with Circumflex) is byte 202 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00CA. French needs it in capitals such as ÊTRE and FORÊT, Portuguese at the start of a sentence like Êxito garantido, and Vietnamese treats Ê as a letter of its own. Its garbled form hides well. UTF-8 stores Ê as C3 8A, and 8A is Š in Windows-1252, so FORÊT becomes FORÃŠT, which looks like two real letters rather than an encoding bug. The HTML entity is Ê.

╩ (Double Up and Horizontal) is byte 202 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+2569. It's the tee on the bottom edge of an all-double frame or table, where a double column divider ║ (186) meets ═ (205); its top-edge twin ╦ is at 203. On web pages, font coverage decides whether it lines up. If the page font lacks box drawing, the browser borrows each missing glyph from a fallback font, and pieces from two fonts may not match in width or weight. A monospace font that covers the whole block, such as DejaVu Sans Mono or Cascadia Mono, avoids the patchwork. In UTF-8 it's E2 95 A9, and the HTML entity is &boxHU;.

Latin LetterBox Drawing

Technical Details

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 202 is Ê.
       Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */
    printf("\u00CA\n");   /* UTF-8: C3 8A */

    unsigned char b = 202;         /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */
    printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b);    /* 202 0xCA */
    return 0;
}

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* Byte 202 is ╩ only on a console using code page 437
       (chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the
       lone byte 0xCA is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */
    putchar(202);

    /* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xCA is -54.
       Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */
    char c = (char)202;
    unsigned char u = 202;
    printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u);   /* -54 202 */

    /* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */
    printf("\u2569\n");          /* E2 95 A9 */
    return 0;
}

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 0202 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00CA and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Option+I, then Shift+E.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type ca, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, caret, E.
Phone: Tap Shift, then long-press E and pick Ê.

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 202 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts ╩. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 2569 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for "box drawings double up and horizontal".
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2569, then Space.
Phone: Phone keyboards have no key for it. Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Not safely, because some French words differ only by that accent. FORÊT is a forest while FORET is a drill bit, and PECHEUR without its accent could be PÊCHEUR, a fisher, or PÉCHEUR, a sinner. Keep Ê in capitals exactly as you would in lowercase.
Windows-1252 has the plain Ê but none of the toned forms Vietnamese uses constantly, like Ế (U+1EBE) and Ệ (U+1EC6), so converting to it turns them into question marks. Keep Vietnamese in UTF-8, and normalize to NFC as well, since some input methods type Ê plus a separate combining tone mark, which looks identical but won't match the precomposed letter in a search.

ASCII 202

Uppercase E with circumflexDouble box T-junction pointing up

ASCII 202 is Ê on Windows and ╩ in old DOS.

Latin Letter

Box Drawing

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 202 is Ê.

Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */

printf("\u00CA\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 8A */

unsigned char b = 202; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */

printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 202 0xCA */

return 0;

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* Byte 202 is ╩ only on a console using code page 437

(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the

lone byte 0xCA is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */

putchar(202);

/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xCA is -54.

Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */

char c = (char)202;

unsigned char u = 202;

printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -54 202 */

/* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */

printf("\u2569\n"); /* E2 95 A9 */

return 0;

}