ASCII 163
Pound Sign (£)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 163 (0xA3) is Pound Sign, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as '£' and its binary byte is 10100011.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '£' is the single byte 0xA3. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA3. 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+00A3, and in HTML you can write it as £ or £.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 163 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xA3 |
| Octal | 0243 |
| Binary | 10100011 |
| HTML numeric entity | £ |
| HTML named entity | £ |
| URL encoding | %A3 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xA3 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(163); // "£"
163.toString(16); // "a3"Python
chr(163) # control char £
ord(chr(163)) # 163
hex(163) # '0xa3'HTML
£ <!-- named entity -->
£ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xA3 in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA3 in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00A3; 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+00A3. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA3. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xA3, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 163?
ASCII code 163 is the character '£' (Pound Sign). In hexadecimal it is 0xA3, in octal 0243, and in binary 10100011.
What is 0xA3 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xA3 equals decimal 163, which is the character '£' (Pound Sign). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xA3 = 163) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 163 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(163); in Python use chr(163); in HTML use the numeric entity £ or the named entity £. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %A3, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA3.
Is '£' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '£' is code 163, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xA3 in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xA3) in UTF-8.