0xB3

0xB3 is a hexadecimal literal used in computing. The written form indicates a byte value with base-16 digits B and 3; it equals decimal 179. The 0x prefix is widely used to denote hex literals in languages such as C, Java, JavaScript, and Python.

In character encoding terms, 0xB3 maps to the superscript three character '³' in ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 (Unicode code point U+00B3). In UTF-8, the code point U+00B3 is encoded as two bytes: 0xC2 0xB3.

In software development, 0xB3 appears in hex dumps, bitwise operations, and as a numeric constant. For example, in code, 0xB3 evaluates to 179; when treated as characters, encoding determines whether it displays as a symbol or as a non-printable value.

Because encoding schemes differ, interpreting a raw byte 0xB3 as text can yield different results depending on the system’s character set. Misinterpretations can occur when data labeled as UTF-8 is actually encoded in Latin-1 or Windows-1252.

The use of the 0x prefix for hexadecimal literals is a convention dating back to early programming languages like C and has become ubiquitous in modern languages, data formats, and tooling.