ASCII 188
Vulgar Fraction One Quarter (¼)
Latin-1 Supplement
One-quarter fraction. Precomposed glyph — for arbitrary fractions use ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ etc.
Common uses & context
Decimal 188 (0xBC) is Vulgar Fraction One Quarter, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). One-quarter fraction. Precomposed glyph — for arbitrary fractions use ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ etc. It renders as '¼' and its binary byte is 10111100.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '¼' is the single byte 0xBC. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xBC. 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+00BC, and in HTML you can write it as ¼ or ¼.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 188 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xBC |
| Octal | 0274 |
| Binary | 10111100 |
| HTML numeric entity | ¼ |
| HTML named entity | ¼ |
| URL encoding | %BC |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xBC |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(188); // "¼"
188.toString(16); // "bc"Python
chr(188) # control char ¼
ord(chr(188)) # 188
hex(188) # '0xbc'HTML
¼ <!-- named entity -->
¼ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xBC in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xBC in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00BC; HTML entity ¼.
- ▸If '¼' 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+00BC. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xBC. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xBC, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 188?
ASCII code 188 is the character '¼' (Vulgar Fraction One Quarter). In hexadecimal it is 0xBC, in octal 0274, and in binary 10111100.
What is 0xBC in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xBC equals decimal 188, which is the character '¼' (Vulgar Fraction One Quarter). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xBC = 188) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 188 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(188); in Python use chr(188); in HTML use the numeric entity ¼ or the named entity ¼. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %BC, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xBC.
Is '¼' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '¼' is code 188, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xBC in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xBC) in UTF-8.