How to type Left Curly Bracket
{ is Shift + [, in the same place on US and UK keyboards. Alt + 123 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and { writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+007B.
Left Curly Bracket
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+007B
- Windows
- Alt + 123
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 123 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | { | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+007B | LEFT CURLY BRACKET |
Symbols related to Left Curly Bracket
These are filed under brace, bracket and open in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other punctuation symbols
{ lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Ps, an opening bracket. It expects a matching closing character.
What Left Curly Bracket is used for
In mathematical notation { is an opening delimiter: it pairs with a closing partner and grows to the height of whatever it encloses when the pair is written with \left and \right. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\lbrace$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for { in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are open curly bracket, brace and gullwing. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Left Curly Bracket is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Left Curly Bracket
The standard recognises { under other names as well: opening curly bracket (1.0), left brace. Those are a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why they turn up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
How Left Curly Bracket 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. It is a mirrored character: in right-to-left text it is drawn reversed, so it keeps pointing at what it pointed at.
Every way to write Left Curly Bracket
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+007B |
| Decimal | 123 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 7B |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 7B |
| HTML entity | { |
| HTML numeric | { or { |
| CSS | \007B |
| JavaScript | \u007B |
| Python | \u007B |
| URL-encoded | %7B |
| LaTeX, in prose | \{ |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\lbrace$ |
| SVG | 007B.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If { needs escaping
{ is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written {, in a URL it is %7B, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why { is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.