ASCII 170
Feminine Ordinal Indicator (ª)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 170 (0xAA) is Feminine Ordinal Indicator, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as 'ª' and its binary byte is 10101010.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'ª' is the single byte 0xAA. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAA. 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+00AA, and in HTML you can write it as ª or ª.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 170 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xAA |
| Octal | 0252 |
| Binary | 10101010 |
| HTML numeric entity | ª |
| HTML named entity | ª |
| URL encoding | %AA |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xAA |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(170); // "ª"
170.toString(16); // "aa"Python
chr(170) # control char ª
ord(chr(170)) # 170
hex(170) # '0xaa'HTML
ª <!-- named entity -->
ª <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xAA in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAA in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00AA; HTML entity ª.
- ▸If 'ª' 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+00AA. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAA. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xAA, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 170?
ASCII code 170 is the character 'ª' (Feminine Ordinal Indicator). In hexadecimal it is 0xAA, in octal 0252, and in binary 10101010.
What is 0xAA in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xAA equals decimal 170, which is the character 'ª' (Feminine Ordinal Indicator). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xAA = 170) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 170 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(170); in Python use chr(170); in HTML use the numeric entity ª or the named entity ª. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %AA, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAA.
Is 'ª' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'ª' is code 170, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xAA in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xAA) in UTF-8.