DevKits

ASCII 254

Character 254 (þ)

Latin-1 Supplement

Latin small letter with diacritic. Used in Northern European alphabets.

Common uses & context

Decimal 254 (0xFE) is Character 254, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin small letter with diacritic. Used in Northern European alphabets. It renders as 'þ' and its binary byte is 11111110.

This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 'þ' is the single byte 0xFE. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0xBE. 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+00FE, and in HTML you can write it as þ.

All encodings at a glance

Decimal254
Hexadecimal0xFE
Octal0376
Binary11111110
HTML numeric entityþ
URL encoding%FE
UTF-8 bytes0xC3 0xBE

Code snippets

JavaScript

String.fromCharCode(254); // "þ"
254.toString(16); // "fe"

Python

chr(254)           # control char þ
ord(chr(254))      # 254
hex(254)           # '0xfe'

HTML

&#254;   <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->

Programming notes

  • Single byte 0xFE in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC3 0xBE in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
  • Unicode code point U+00FE; HTML numeric entity &#254;.
  • If 'þ' 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+00FE. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC3 0xBE. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xFE, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.

Frequently asked questions

What character is ASCII code 254?

ASCII code 254 is the character 'þ' (Character 254). In hexadecimal it is 0xFE, in octal 0376, and in binary 11111110.

What is 0xFE in ASCII?

Hexadecimal 0xFE equals decimal 254, which is the character 'þ' (Character 254). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xFE = 254) and look up that code point.

How do I write the character with code 254 in code?

In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(254); in Python use chr(254); in HTML use the numeric entity &#254;. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %FE, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC3 0xBE.

Is 'þ' part of standard ASCII?

No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. 'þ' is code 254, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xFE in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC3 0xBE) in UTF-8.

Nearby codes

Encode & convert this character