ASCII 185
Superscript One (¹)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 185 (0xB9) is Superscript One, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as '¹' and its binary byte is 10111001.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '¹' is the single byte 0xB9. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xB9. 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+00B9, and in HTML you can write it as ¹ or ¹.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 185 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xB9 |
| Octal | 0271 |
| Binary | 10111001 |
| HTML numeric entity | ¹ |
| HTML named entity | ¹ |
| URL encoding | %B9 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xB9 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(185); // "¹"
185.toString(16); // "b9"Python
chr(185) # control char ¹
ord(chr(185)) # 185
hex(185) # '0xb9'HTML
¹ <!-- named entity -->
¹ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xB9 in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xB9 in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00B9; HTML entity ¹.
- ▸If '¹' 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+00B9. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xB9. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xB9, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 185?
ASCII code 185 is the character '¹' (Superscript One). In hexadecimal it is 0xB9, in octal 0271, and in binary 10111001.
What is 0xB9 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xB9 equals decimal 185, which is the character '¹' (Superscript One). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xB9 = 185) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 185 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(185); in Python use chr(185); in HTML use the numeric entity ¹ or the named entity ¹. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %B9, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xB9.
Is '¹' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '¹' is code 185, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xB9 in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xB9) in UTF-8.