How to type Broken Bar
To type Broken Bar (¦), press Alt + 0166 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ¦ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00A6 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00a6 on Linux, or 00a6 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Broken Bar
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00A6
- Windows
- Alt + 0166
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0166 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ¦ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00A6 | BROKEN BAR |
Other symbols
¦ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.
What ¦ gets confused with
¦ has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.
| (U+007C) is the vertical line, the one a shell pipe and a regular expression want. The broken bar sits on many keyboards where the solid one should be, which is the whole reason it is still here.
‖ (U+2016) is the double vertical line, which marks a norm in mathematics.
What Unicode says about Broken Bar
The standard recognises ¦ under other names as well: broken vertical bar (1.0), parted rule (in typography). Those are a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why they turn up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from ¦ to Vertical Bar. These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Broken Bar looks nearly right but not quite.
How Broken Bar behaves in software
¦ takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Broken Bar
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00A6 |
| Decimal | 166 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 A6 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 A6 |
| HTML entity | ¦ |
| HTML numeric | ¦ or ¦ |
| CSS | \00A6 |
| JavaScript | \u00A6 |
| Python | \u00A6 |
| URL-encoded | %C2%A6 |
| SVG | 00A6.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ¦ arrives as ¦
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 A6 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00A6.