ASCII 172
Not Sign (¬)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 172 (0xAC) is Not Sign, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as '¬' and its binary byte is 10101100.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '¬' is the single byte 0xAC. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAC. 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+00AC, and in HTML you can write it as ¬ or ¬.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 172 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xAC |
| Octal | 0254 |
| Binary | 10101100 |
| HTML numeric entity | ¬ |
| HTML named entity | ¬ |
| URL encoding | %AC |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xAC |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(172); // "¬"
172.toString(16); // "ac"Python
chr(172) # control char ¬
ord(chr(172)) # 172
hex(172) # '0xac'HTML
¬ <!-- named entity -->
¬ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xAC in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAC in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00AC; 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+00AC. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAC. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xAC, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 172?
ASCII code 172 is the character '¬' (Not Sign). In hexadecimal it is 0xAC, in octal 0254, and in binary 10101100.
What is 0xAC in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xAC equals decimal 172, which is the character '¬' (Not Sign). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xAC = 172) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 172 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(172); in Python use chr(172); in HTML use the numeric entity ¬ or the named entity ¬. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %AC, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAC.
Is '¬' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '¬' is code 172, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xAC in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xAC) in UTF-8.