Lowercase Greek alpha in ASCII on OS X

Question

Does anyone know the three digit ASCII code for the lowercase Greek letter 'alpha' for OS X? 945 doesn't work and the only list I've found that works for me is here but the list doesn't contain the lowercase alpha.

I need the decimal for this letter for a find and replace function of mixed Greek and Latin letters in one word.

Answer 1

There's no ASCII code for the lowercase Greek alpha (U+03B1, α), since ASCII only contains (invisible) control characters as well as a small amount of printable characters, none of which contain Greek letters.

The only (widely used) Western Latin character sets I know of that contain the lowercase Greek alpha are

• Code page 437 at position 224.
• ISO 8859-7 and Windows-1253 at position 225.

If you want to find and replace, I'd suggest using the direct Unicode characters instead, if the program you intend to use supports UTF-8, for example.

Answer 2

ASCII (US-ASCII) only has 128 characters, which doesn't include Greek characters. If you meant the Unicode code point, you can see it from Character Viewer.

Select Edit > Special Characters..., search for alpha, and select Copy Character Info from the context menu for the character.

α
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
Unicode: U+03B1, UTF-8: CE B1

You can convert the hexadecimal code point (3B1) to decimal in Terminal:

$ let x=0x3B1; echo $x
945