0xBC

0xBC is a hexadecimal literal used in computing to denote the single byte value with the hexadecimal value BC, which equals 188 in decimal. In binary this value is 10111100. When interpreted as an unsigned 8-bit integer, 0xBC is 188; as a signed 8-bit integer (two's complement) it represents -68.

In character encoding, the meaning of the byte 0xBC depends on the encoding scheme. In ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) and Windows-1252, the byte 0xBC maps to the vulgar fraction one quarter (¼). In Unicode, the code point U+00BC represents the same character, and the UTF-8 encoding of that character is the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0xBC. This means that a text stream interpreted as UTF-8 would require those two bytes to render as the single character ¼.

In software development, 0xBC frequently appears as a numeric literal in languages such as C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python, where 0xBC evaluates to 188. It is also common in hex dumps and low-level data analysis where raw byte values are shown with a 0x prefix.

Because 0xBC can correspond to different symbols depending on the encoding, its display in text is encoding-dependent. Misinterpreting the encoding can lead to displaying ¼ in some contexts and a different glyph or an undecodable character in others. Understanding the intended encoding is essential when interpreting or transporting bytes like 0xBC.