ASCII 197
Character 197 (Å)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin capital letter Å. Common in Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese).
Common uses & context
Decimal 197 (0xC5) is Character 197, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin capital letter Å. Common in Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese). It renders as 'Å' and its binary byte is 11000101.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'Å' is the single byte 0xC5. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x85. 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+00C5, and in HTML you can write it as Å.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 197 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xC5 |
| Octal | 0305 |
| Binary | 11000101 |
| HTML numeric entity | Å |
| URL encoding | %C5 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC3 0x85 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(197); // "Å"
197.toString(16); // "c5"Python
chr(197) # control char Å
ord(chr(197)) # 197
hex(197) # '0xc5'HTML
Å <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xC5 in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x85 in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00C5; HTML numeric entity Å.
- ▸If 'Å' 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+00C5. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC3 0x85. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xC5, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 197?
ASCII code 197 is the character 'Å' (Character 197). In hexadecimal it is 0xC5, in octal 0305, and in binary 11000101.
What is 0xC5 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xC5 equals decimal 197, which is the character 'Å' (Character 197). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xC5 = 197) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 197 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(197); in Python use chr(197); in HTML use the numeric entity Å. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %C5, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC3 0x85.
Is 'Å' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'Å' is code 197, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xC5 in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC3 0x85) in UTF-8.