ASCII 253
Character 253 (ý)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin small letter with diacritic. Used in Northern European alphabets.
Common uses & context
Decimal 253 (0xFD) is Character 253, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin small letter with diacritic. Used in Northern European alphabets. It renders as 'ý' and its binary byte is 11111101.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'ý' is the single byte 0xFD. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0xBD. 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+00FD, and in HTML you can write it as ý.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 253 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xFD |
| Octal | 0375 |
| Binary | 11111101 |
| HTML numeric entity | ý |
| URL encoding | %FD |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC3 0xBD |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(253); // "ý"
253.toString(16); // "fd"Python
chr(253) # control char ý
ord(chr(253)) # 253
hex(253) # '0xfd'HTML
ý <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xFD in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0xBD in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00FD; HTML numeric entity ý.
- ▸If 'ý' 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+00FD. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC3 0xBD. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xFD, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 253?
ASCII code 253 is the character 'ý' (Character 253). In hexadecimal it is 0xFD, in octal 0375, and in binary 11111101.
What is 0xFD in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xFD equals decimal 253, which is the character 'ý' (Character 253). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xFD = 253) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 253 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(253); in Python use chr(253); in HTML use the numeric entity ý. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %FD, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC3 0xBD.
Is 'ý' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'ý' is code 253, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xFD in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC3 0xBD) in UTF-8.