DevKits

ASCII 139

Character 139 (‹)

Latin-1 Supplement

Unassigned in Latin-1 / part of the C1 control block. Not used in modern text encoding; browsers accept these code points but they carry no display glyph.

Common uses & context

Decimal 139 (0x8B) falls in the C1 control range (128–159). In the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding these code points are unassigned control positions with no visible glyph, and in Windows-1252 many of them were repurposed for typographic characters like curly quotes and the em dash. That mismatch is a classic cause of mojibake: a byte stored as Windows-1252 but decoded as Latin-1 (or UTF-8) shows the wrong character or a replacement box.

In modern Unicode, U+008B is a C1 control code. Its UTF-8 encoding is the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0x8B, which is why a raw high byte 0x8B from a legacy Latin-1 file becomes garbled when a program assumes UTF-8.

All encodings at a glance

Decimal139
Hexadecimal0x8B
Octal0213
Binary10001011
HTML numeric entity‹
URL encoding%8B
UTF-8 bytes0xC2 0x8B

Code snippets

JavaScript

String.fromCharCode(139); // "‹"
139.toString(16); // "8b"

Python

chr(139)           # control char ‹
ord(chr(139))      # 139
hex(139)           # '0x8b'

HTML

&#139;   <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->

Programming notes

  • Code 139 is in the C1 control range — unassigned in Latin-1, repurposed in Windows-1252.
  • A raw byte 0x8B decoded as UTF-8 becomes garbage; specify the correct charset explicitly.
  • UTF-8 encoding: 0xC2 0x8B; Unicode code point U+008B.

Unicode & UTF-8 note

In Unicode this is U+008B. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0x8B. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0x8B, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.

Frequently asked questions

What character is ASCII code 139?

ASCII code 139 is the character '‹' (Character 139). In hexadecimal it is 0x8B, in octal 0213, and in binary 10001011.

What is 0x8B in ASCII?

Hexadecimal 0x8B equals decimal 139, which is the character '‹' (Character 139). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0x8B = 139) and look up that code point.

How do I write the character with code 139 in code?

In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(139); in Python use chr(139); in HTML use the numeric entity &#139;. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %8B, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0x8B.

Nearby codes

Encode & convert this character