ASCII 223
Character 223 (ß)
Latin-1 Supplement
German eszett (ß). Used exclusively in lowercase; the uppercase form ẞ was added to Unicode in 2008.
Common uses & context
Decimal 223 (0xDF) is Character 223, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). German eszett (ß). Used exclusively in lowercase; the uppercase form ẞ was added to Unicode in 2008. It renders as 'ß' and its binary byte is 11011111.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'ß' is the single byte 0xDF. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x9F. 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+00DF, and in HTML you can write it as ß.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 223 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xDF |
| Octal | 0337 |
| Binary | 11011111 |
| HTML numeric entity | ß |
| URL encoding | %DF |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC3 0x9F |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(223); // "ß"
223.toString(16); // "df"Python
chr(223) # control char ß
ord(chr(223)) # 223
hex(223) # '0xdf'HTML
ß <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xDF in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0x9F in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00DF; HTML numeric entity ß.
- ▸If 'ß' 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+00DF. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC3 0x9F. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xDF, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 223?
ASCII code 223 is the character 'ß' (Character 223). In hexadecimal it is 0xDF, in octal 0337, and in binary 11011111.
What is 0xDF in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xDF equals decimal 223, which is the character 'ß' (Character 223). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xDF = 223) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 223 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(223); in Python use chr(223); in HTML use the numeric entity ß. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %DF, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC3 0x9F.
Is 'ß' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'ß' is code 223, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xDF in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC3 0x9F) in UTF-8.