# Why can copied text turn into unexpected characters such as A with tilde?

U+00C3 U+00A9 is what the UTF-8 bytes of U+00E9 (C3 A9) become when each byte is taken as a Latin-1 code point: A with tilde, then the copyright sign. Code points: U+00C3, U+00A9. Those two scalars are also a legal string on their own. Seeing them does not prove a file was mis-decoded. No destination encoding was tested. A non-equivalent fallback is "é" (The scalar whose UTF-8 encoding is the bytes C3 A9). Use it only when that byte pair was meant to be U+00E9. It is not a repair for every unexpected letter. Exact string match: no. NFC match: no. Appearance and meaning were not tested. Font coverage, shaping, and application acceptance were not tested, so those results are unknown.

## Code points

- U+00C3 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE
- U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN

## What was checked

### Bytes read as the wrong encoding

U+00C3 U+00A9 is what the UTF-8 bytes of U+00E9 (C3 A9) become when each byte is taken as a Latin-1 code point: A with tilde, then the copyright sign.

Those two scalars are also a legal string on their own. Seeing them does not prove a file was mis-decoded. No destination encoding was tested.

Compare the code points with U+00E9 before replacing them. Repair the bytes only when C3 A9 was meant to be U+00E9.

## What this does not prove

No OS, font, browser, application, field policy or rendering engine was tested. Unicode validity and segmentation do not establish actual display or acceptance.

Unicode release recorded with this answer: 18.0.0.
Machine-readable JSON: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/answers/why-copied-text-can-turn-into-unexpected-latin-letters.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/00C3-00A9.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/why-copied-text-can-turn-into-unexpected-latin-letters/

Do not invent a platform-support claim from this data.