0xB1

0xB1 is a hexadecimal byte value commonly encountered in computing. In decimal terms, it equals 177, and it is frequently used in programming and data formats to denote a single 8-bit quantity.

In character encodings, 0xB1 maps to the plus-minus symbol in several common single-byte schemes. In ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and Windows-1252, 0xB1 corresponds to the character "±" and the Unicode code point U+00B1. The Unicode representation of the same symbol is U+00B1, whose UTF-8 encoding is the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0xB1. It is important to note that mappings can differ in other encodings; therefore, the same byte value may represent a different character depending on the text encoding used.

In programming languages, 0xB1 is used as a hex literal to specify a byte value. It can be interpreted as the unsigned value 177, or as a signed 8-bit value of -79 when interpreted in two's complement form. This dual interpretation is relevant in low-level programming, embedded systems, and situations involving raw binary data.

Related hex values, such as 0xB0 (176) and 0xB2 (178), share the same high nibble and appear in similar contexts when dealing with extended-ASCII ranges or specific protocol byte sequences. Understanding 0xB1 thus involves distinguishing between its numeric value in hex, its character mapping in a given encoding, and its interpretation as a signed or unsigned byte in software.