Is Søren written Soren or Soeren in ASCII?

Soeren. The standard Danish and Norwegian fallback for ø is oe, and passports use it in the machine-readable line, so Ø becomes OE there too. Plain o turns up in URLs and email addresses, but it can merge different names, so keep oe wherever a name has to match an official document.

Why does Alt+248 give ° but Alt+0248 give ø?

For ° you can type either Alt+248 or Alt+0176, and for ø it's Alt+0248, or Alt+0216 for Ø. The zero decides the table: without it Windows looks in the DOS code page, with it in Windows-1252, and the two tables put these characters in different slots.

Why does my old data file say 25ø instead of 25°?

A DOS-era program wrote the degree sign as a single byte, and the file is being read as Windows-1252, which shows that byte as ø. If the file holds no real Danish or Norwegian text, reopen it with a DOS code page, 437 or the European 850, and every degree sign comes back. If it does, only replace an ø that directly follows a digit.

ASCII 248

Lowercase o with strokeDegree sign

ASCII 248 is ø on Windows and ° in old DOS.

ø (Small O with Stroke) is byte 248 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00F8. Danish and Norwegian write it in words like søster and brød, and Faroese uses it too. In phonetics ø is the IPA symbol for the rounded front vowel of French peu. Its garbled form is familiar to anyone who handles Danish data: UTF-8 stores ø as C3 B8, and B8 is the cedilla ¸ in Windows-1252, so København turns into KÃ¸benhavn. Code page 437 had no ø at all. The HTML entity is ø.

° (Degree Sign) is byte 248 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00B0. Windows-1252 has ø at 248, so temperatures from a DOS file read as Windows-1252 turn 25° into 25ø. Code page 850 kept ° at 248.

Latin LetterSymbol

Technical Details

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 248 is ø.
       Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */
    printf("\u00F8\n");   /* UTF-8: C3 B8 */

    unsigned char b = 248;         /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */
    printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b);    /* 248 0xF8 */
    return 0;
}

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* Byte 248 is ° only on a console using code page 437
       (chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the
       lone byte 0xF8 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */
    putchar(248);

    /* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF8 is -8.
       Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */
    char c = (char)248;
    unsigned char u = 248;
    printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u);   /* -8 248 */

    /* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */
    printf("\u00B0\n");          /* C2 B0 */
    return 0;
}

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 0248 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00F8 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Option+O.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type f8, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, slash, o.
Phone: Long-press o and pick ø.

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 248 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts °.

° is also ASCII 176 on Windows, which has the full guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Soeren. The standard Danish and Norwegian fallback for ø is oe, and passports use it in the machine-readable line, so Ø becomes OE there too. Plain o turns up in URLs and email addresses, but it can merge different names, so keep oe wherever a name has to match an official document.
For ° you can type either Alt+248 or Alt+0176, and for ø it's Alt+0248, or Alt+0216 for Ø. The zero decides the table: without it Windows looks in the DOS code page, with it in Windows-1252, and the two tables put these characters in different slots.
A DOS-era program wrote the degree sign as a single byte, and the file is being read as Windows-1252, which shows that byte as ø. If the file holds no real Danish or Norwegian text, reopen it with a DOS code page, 437 or the European 850, and every degree sign comes back. If it does, only replace an ø that directly follows a digit.

Frequently Asked Questions

For ° you can type either Alt+248 or Alt+0176, and for ø it's Alt+0248, or Alt+0216 for Ø. The zero decides the table: without it Windows looks in the DOS code page, with it in Windows-1252, and the two tables put these characters in different slots.
A DOS-era program wrote the degree sign as a single byte, and the file is being read as Windows-1252, which shows that byte as ø. If the file holds no real Danish or Norwegian text, reopen it with a DOS code page, 437 or the European 850, and every degree sign comes back. If it does, only replace an ø that directly follows a digit.

ASCII 248

Lowercase o with strokeDegree sign

ASCII 248 is ø on Windows and ° in old DOS.

Latin Letter

Symbol

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 248 is ø.

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

printf("\u00F8\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 B8 */

unsigned char b = 248; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */

printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 248 0xF8 */

return 0;

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* Byte 248 is ° only on a console using code page 437

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

lone byte 0xF8 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */

putchar(248);

/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF8 is -8.

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

char c = (char)248;

unsigned char u = 248;

printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -8 248 */

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

printf("\u00B0\n"); /* C2 B0 */

return 0;

}