ASCII 173
Soft Hyphen (SHY)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 173 (0xAD) is Soft Hyphen, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as '' and its binary byte is 10101101.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '' is the single byte 0xAD. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAD. 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+00AD, and in HTML you can write it as ­ or ­.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 173 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xAD |
| Octal | 0255 |
| Binary | 10101101 |
| HTML numeric entity | ­ |
| HTML named entity | ­ |
| URL encoding | %AD |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xAD |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(173); // "SHY"
173.toString(16); // "ad"Python
chr(173) # control char SHY
ord(chr(173)) # 173
hex(173) # '0xad'HTML
­ <!-- named entity -->
­ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xAD in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAD in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00AD; 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+00AD. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAD. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xAD, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 173?
ASCII code 173 is the character '' (Soft Hyphen). In hexadecimal it is 0xAD, in octal 0255, and in binary 10101101.
What is 0xAD in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xAD equals decimal 173, which is the character '' (Soft Hyphen). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xAD = 173) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 173 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(173); in Python use chr(173); in HTML use the numeric entity ­ or the named entity ­. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %AD, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xAD.
Is '' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '' is code 173, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xAD in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xAD) in UTF-8.