General Punctuation

Last updated
General Punctuation
RangeU+2000..U+206F
(112 code points)
Plane BMP
Scripts Common (109 char.)
Inherited (2 char.)
Symbol setsPunctuation
Spaces
Format controls
Assigned111 code points
Unused1 reserved code points
6 deprecated
Unicode version history
1.0.0 (1991)67 (+67)
1.1 (1993)76 (+9)
3.0 (1999)83 (+7)
3.2 (2002)95 (+12)
4.0 (2003)97 (+2)
4.1 (2005)106 (+9)
5.1 (2008)107 (+1)
6.3 (2013)111 (+4)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [1] [2]

General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic and novel punctuation such as the interrobang, and invisible mathematical operators.

Contents

Additional punctuation characters are in the Supplemental Punctuation block and sprinkled in dozens of other Unicode blocks.

Block

General Punctuation [1] [2] [3]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
 0123456789ABCDEF
U+200x NQ
 SP  		MQ
 SP  		EN
 SP  		EM
 SP  		 3/M 
SP 		 4/M 
SP 		 6/M 
SP 		F
 SP  		P
 SP  		TH
 SP  		H
 SP  		ZW
 SP  		ZW
 NJ  		 ZW 
J 		 LRM   RLM 
U+201x ‐  NB 
‑ 		‒ – — ― ‖ ‗ ‘ ’ ‚ ‛ “ ” „ ‟
U+202x † ‡ • ‣ ․ ‥ … ‧ L
 SEP  		P
 SEP  		 LRE   RLE   PDF   LRO   RLO   NNB 
SP
U+203x ‰ ‱ ′ ″ ‴ ‵ ‶ ‷ ‸ ‹ › ※ ‼ ‽ ‾ ‿
U+204x ⁀ ⁁ ⁂ ⁃ ⁄ ⁅ ⁆ ⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ⁊ ⁋ ⁌ ⁍ ⁎ ⁏
U+205x ⁐ ⁑ ⁒ ⁓ ⁔ ⁕ ⁖ ⁗ ⁘ ⁙ ⁚ ⁛ ⁜ ⁝ ⁞ MM
  SP  
U+206x  WJ   ƒ()    ×     ,     +    LRI   RLI   FSI   PDI  I
 SS  		A
 SS  		I
 AFS  		A
 AFS  		NA
 DS  		NO
 DS 
Notes
1. ^ As of Unicode version 15.0
2. ^ Grey area indicates non-assigned code point
3. ^ Unicode code points U+206A - U+206F are deprecated as of Unicode version 3.0

Several characters in this block are usually not rendered with a directly visible glyph. Ten whitespace characters U+2002 through U+200B (fixed en or 1⁄2em, em, 1⁄3em, 1⁄4em, 1⁄6em, figure and punctuation space, variable thin or 1⁄5em and hair space, fixed zero-width space) and U+205F (math medium or 2⁄9 em space) differ by horizontal width, while U+2000 and U+2001 (en and em quad) are effectively aliases of U+2002 and U+2003, respectively; another two, U+202F and U+2060 (ill-termed word joiner) are variants of U+2009 or U+2004 and U+200B that prohibit line-breaks. Three zero-width characters U+200B through U+200D (space, non-joiner and joiner) differ in how they affect ligation and shaping of adjacent letters such as contextual forms in Arabic. Eleven invisible characters U+200E, U+200F (left-to-right and right-to-left mark), U+202A through U+202E (embeds, pops and overrides) and U+2066 through U+2069 (isolates) control the directionality of text unless higher-level markup overrides them. There are explicit line and paragraph separators at U+2028 and U+2029.

Emoji

The General Punctuation block contains two emoji: U+203C and U+2049. [3] [4]

The block has four standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for the two emoji, both of which default to a text presentation. [5]

Emoji variation sequences
U+203C2049
base code point‼⁉
base+VS15 (text)‼︎⁉︎
base+VS16 (emoji)‼️⁉️

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the General Punctuation block:

Related Research Articles

In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page. For example, the common whitespace symbol U+0020 SPACE represents a blank space punctuation character in text, used as a word divider in Western scripts.

Letterlike Symbols is a Unicode block containing 80 characters which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters. In addition to this block, Unicode includes full styled mathematical alphabets, although Unicode does not explicitly categorize these characters as being "letterlike."

Miscellaneous Technical is a Unicode block ranging from U+2300 to U+23FF, which contains various common symbols which are related to and used in the various technical, programming language, and academic professions. For example:

Supplemental Arrows-B is a Unicode block containing miscellaneous arrows, arrow tails, crossing arrows used in knot descriptions, curved arrows, and harpoons.

Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows is a Unicode block containing arrows and geometric shapes with various fills, astrological symbols, technical symbols, intonation marks, and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universal Character Set characters</span> Complete list of the characters available on most computers

The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set. The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set, is an international standard to map characters, discrete symbols used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other domains, to unique machine-readable data values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, and transmit—interchange—UCS-encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple interpretations depending on the character encoding in use, resulting in mojibake if the wrong one is chosen.

The Basic Latin Unicode block, sometimes informally called C0 Controls and Basic Latin, is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ranges from U+0000 to U+007F, contains 128 characters and includes the C0 controls, ASCII punctuation and symbols, ASCII digits, both the uppercase and lowercase of the English alphabet and a control character.

The Latin-1 Supplement is the second Unicode block in the Unicode standard. It encodes the upper range of ISO 8859-1: 80 (U+0080) - FF (U+00FF). C1 Controls (0080–009F) are not graphic. This block ranges from U+0080 to U+00FF, contains 128 characters and includes the C1 controls, Latin-1 punctuation and symbols, 30 pairs of majuscule and minuscule accented Latin characters and 2 mathematical operators.

The zero-width space (​), abbreviated ZWSP, is a non-printing character used in computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text-processing systems in scripts that do not use explicit spacing, or after characters that are not followed by a visible space but after which there may nevertheless be a line break. It is also used with languages without visible space between words, for example, Japanese. Normally, it is not a visible separation, but it may expand in passages that are fully justified.

Enclosed Alphanumerics is a Unicode block of typographical symbols of an alphanumeric within a circle, a bracket or other not-closed enclosure, or ending in a full stop.

The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.

CJK Symbols and Punctuation is a Unicode block containing symbols and punctuation used for writing the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. It also contains one Chinese character.

The regional indicator symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic Unicode characters (A–Z) intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment.

Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement is a Unicode block consisting of Latin alphabet characters and Arabic numerals enclosed in circles, ovals or boxes, used for a variety of purposes. It is encoded in the range U+1F100–U+1F1FF in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months is a Unicode block containing circled and parenthesized Katakana, Hangul, and CJK ideographs. Also included in the block are miscellaneous glyphs that would more likely fit in CJK Compatibility or Enclosed Alphanumerics: a few unit abbreviations, circled numbers from 21 to 50, and circled multiples of 10 from 10 to 80 enclosed in black squares.

Dingbats is a Unicode block containing dingbats. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats; it was the Unicode block to have imported characters from a specific typeface; Unicode later adopted a policy that excluded symbols with "no demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text," and thus no further dingbat typefaces were encoded until Webdings and Wingdings were encoded in Version 7.0. Some ornaments are also an emoji, having optional presentation variants.

Arrows is a Unicode block containing line, curve, and semicircle symbols terminating in barbs or arrows.

Enclosed Ideographic Supplement is a Unicode block containing forms of characters and words from Chinese, Japanese and Korean enclosed within or stylised as squares, brackets, or circles. It contains three such characters containing one or more kana, and many containing CJK ideographs. Many of its characters were added for compatibility with the Japanese ARIB STD-B24 standard. Six symbols from Chinese folk religion were added in Unicode version 10.

Emoticons is a Unicode block containing emoticons or emoji. Most of them are intended as representations of faces, although some of them include hand gestures or non-human characters.

References

  1. ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  3. ↑ "UTR #51: Unicode Emoji". Unicode Consortium. 2023-09-05.
  4. ↑ "UCD: Emoji Data for UTR #51". Unicode Consortium. 2023-02-01.
  5. ↑ "UTS #51 Emoji Variation Sequences". The Unicode Consortium.
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