0xC2

0xC2 is a hexadecimal byte value commonly encountered in computing. It has a decimal value of 194 and can appear within data streams, program code, and character encodings.

In UTF-8, 0xC2 is the smallest valid leading byte for a two-byte sequence. When followed by a byte in the range 0x80 to 0xBF, it encodes code points U+0080 through U+00BF. For example, the pair 0xC2 0xA2 represents the cent sign U+00A2. This pattern is part of how UTF-8 encodes many non-ASCII characters using two bytes.

Because 0xC2 is a leading byte in UTF-8, it commonly appears as part of multibyte representations for characters in the Latin-1 Supplement and related blocks. The broader two-byte leading-byte range for UTF-8 is 0xC2–0xDF, with the second byte still in the 0x80–0xBF range. This distinction helps distinguish valid UTF-8 sequences from invalid ones, such as a leading 0xC2 byte without an appropriate continuation byte.

As a standalone byte value, 0xC2 has no intrinsic meaning in ASCII; its significance depends on the surrounding context, such as the encoding or protocol in use. In programming languages that express numeric literals with a hex prefix, 0xC2 simply denotes the hexadecimal number C2 (decimal 194). In UTF-8 data, its meaning is determined by how it pairs with the following byte.