ASCII 203
Character 203 (Ë)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin capital letter Ë. Common in Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese).
Common uses & context
Decimal 203 (0xCB) is Character 203, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin capital letter Ë. Common in Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese). It renders as 'Ë' and its binary byte is 11001011.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'Ë' is the single byte 0xCB. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x8B. 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+00CB, and in HTML you can write it as Ë.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 203 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xCB |
| Octal | 0313 |
| Binary | 11001011 |
| HTML numeric entity | Ë |
| URL encoding | %CB |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC3 0x8B |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(203); // "Ë"
203.toString(16); // "cb"Python
chr(203) # control char Ë
ord(chr(203)) # 203
hex(203) # '0xcb'HTML
Ë <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xCB in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x8B in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00CB; HTML numeric entity Ë.
- ▸If 'Ë' 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+00CB. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC3 0x8B. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xCB, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 203?
ASCII code 203 is the character 'Ë' (Character 203). In hexadecimal it is 0xCB, in octal 0313, and in binary 11001011.
What is 0xCB in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xCB equals decimal 203, which is the character 'Ë' (Character 203). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xCB = 203) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 203 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(203); in Python use chr(203); in HTML use the numeric entity Ë. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %CB, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC3 0x8B.
Is 'Ë' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'Ë' is code 203, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xCB in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC3 0x8B) in UTF-8.