ASCII 160
Non-Breaking Space (NBSP)
Latin-1 Supplement
Non-breaking space ( ). Prevents an automatic line break at its position; used in HTML to keep phrases like 'Mr. Smith' together.
Common uses & context
Decimal 160 (0xA0) is Non-Breaking Space, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Non-breaking space ( ). Prevents an automatic line break at its position; used in HTML to keep phrases like 'Mr. Smith' together. It renders as ' ' and its binary byte is 10100000.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) ' ' is the single byte 0xA0. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0. Treating a Latin-1 byte as UTF-8 (or vice versa) is the usual reason accented letters and symbols turn into mojibake like é or €. The Unicode code point is U+00A0, and in HTML you can write it as or  .
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 160 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xA0 |
| Octal | 0240 |
| Binary | 10100000 |
| HTML numeric entity |   |
| HTML named entity | |
| URL encoding | %A0 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xA0 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(160); // "NBSP"
160.toString(16); // "a0"Python
chr(160) # control char NBSP
ord(chr(160)) # 160
hex(160) # '0xa0'HTML
<!-- named entity -->
  <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xA0 in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0 in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00A0; HTML entity .
- ▸If ' ' shows as mojibake, the encoding declared and the encoding used disagree — align both on UTF-8.
Unicode & UTF-8 note
In Unicode this is U+00A0. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xA0, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 160?
ASCII code 160 is the character 'NBSP' (Non-Breaking Space). In hexadecimal it is 0xA0, in octal 0240, and in binary 10100000.
What is 0xA0 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xA0 equals decimal 160, which is the character 'NBSP' (Non-Breaking Space). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xA0 = 160) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 160 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(160); in Python use chr(160); in HTML use the numeric entity   or the named entity . In a URL it is percent-encoded as %A0, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0.
Is ' ' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. ' ' is code 160, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xA0 in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xA0) in UTF-8.