Unicode - Code Points

REVERSED QUESTION MARK - the “irony mark” to express irony/sarcasm. A useful character⸮

to U+DFFF - surrogate code points. They are only reserved to ease UTF-16 encoding.

ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE - it’s name suggests, that it can be used like U+2060 WORD JOINER. And in fact the latter was introduced to inherit its semantics. This is because U+FEFF had become a special beacon called the byte order mark, that was placed on the beginning of some UTF-8 files. In complying software (including many text editors) this character is stripped from the start of a file and handled as metadata. In non-complying software (like…

REPLACEMENT CHARACTER - when a character cannot be displayed (e.g., decoding an erroneous UTF-8 sequency), this code point steps into the breach.

is missing. It would be an italic small “h”. It was not encoded, because it would be identical to the Planck constant ℎ (U+210E).

FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN - it is the "Japanese Hashtag" ＃. Sites like Twitter accept it as equivalent to the regular # (U+0023).

and U+202E - change the text direction. Relevant XKCD:

VARIATION SELECTOR-15 - force black-&-white emoji. If this code point follows an emoji, an explicit monochrome rendering of the emoji is requested (if the client supports it).

VARIATION SELECTOR-16 - force colorful emoji. If this code point follows an emoji, an explicit colorful rendering of the emoji is requested (if the client supports it).

Diacritics and combining marks: There is a host of characters, that add to the characters before. Those are called Combining Marks. Unicode provides a handy FAQ on the details, but in a nutshell: If you add one after a character, it is placed on top of that previous one. So, a + ̊ = å. This may lead to all kinds of funny problems, because for some combinations there are pre-composed characters. Our little `å…

The Regional Indicator Symbols U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF resemble the 26 latin characters. They are used to create flag emoji. Since the Unicode consortium didn’t feel like getting on board with international politics, the solution to flags is to combine these 26 characters to the respective ISO code for a country. Examples:CountryISO CodeCode PointsEmoji (if supported)USAUSU+1F1FA + U+1F1F8🇺🇸GermanyDEU+1F1E9 + U+1F1EA🇩🇪ChinaCNU+1F1E8 + U+1F1F3🇨🇳

Skin color of emoji: There are five code points, that control the skin color of emoji, U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF. They are called “Emoji Modifier Fitzpatrick Type” 1 to 6, with 1 the palest and 6 the darkest. If one of these characters follows an emoji, that emoji is meant to be rendered in the appropriate skin color of the Fitzpatrick scale. If no such modifier is added, the skin tone should be unnatural, e.…

NO-BREAK SPACE - force adjacent characters to stick together. Well known as   in HTML.

SOFT HYPHEN - (in HTML: ­) like ZERO WIDTH SPACE, but show a hyphen if (and only if) a break occurs.

ZERO WIDTH SPACE - the inverse to U+00A0: create no space, but allow word breaking.

ZERO WIDTH JOINER - force adjacent characters to be joined together (e.g., arabic characters or supported emoji). Apple uses this to compose some emoji like different families.

WORD JOINER - the same as U+00A0, but completely invisible. Good for writing @font-face on Twitter.

- first code point.

(non-character) - last code point. The whole rest of its plane apart from U+10FFFE, the code points in the 0x10000-0x10FFFD range, are private use characters, guaranteed to be never filled by a future Unicode standard.

OX - shortest name.

ARABIC LIGATURE SALLALLAHOU ALAYHE WASALLAM - longest decomposition form: 18 characters.

and U+16B61 - code points that represent the highest “single-digit” number. In both cases that’s 1,000,000,000,000, a trillion.

TIBETAN DIGIT HALF ZERO - code point that represents the lowest “single-digit” number and at the same time the only negative one, -½.

LATIN SMALL LETTER O - leads the list of characters with confusable shapes. Of all the possible mappings in the list of confusable characters, the small “o” leads with a whopping 73 entries of similar looking glyphs, followed by U+006C LATIN SMALL LETTER L with 70 entries.

DVD - only code point name without any vowel (source)

CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH 3106C - the character with the most strokes: 84. Take your time to write this one!

OGHAM SPACE MARK - a space that looks like a dash. Great to bring programmers close to madness: 1 +  2 === 3.

GREEK QUESTION MARK - a look-alike to the semicolon. Also a fun way to annoy developers.

COMBINING US ABOVE - this is the most romantic code point.

PRIVATE USE CODEPOINT - this private use code point is rendered as Apple logo on many Apple devices.

MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING - A rather curious character, that only made it into Unicode for its appearance in the Webdings font (for reasons of backwards compatibility).

RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS - the Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper! 🖖

SIGN OF THE HORNS - Rock on! 🤘

BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK - A Braille pattern that has zero of its six or eight dots filled in. According to the standard: “* while this character is imaged as a fixed-width blank in many fonts, it does not act as a space” Essentially it is rendered as white-space, but since it is designated as not white-space it isn't matched by white-space-validating regular expressions. This can be used to bypass all kinds of validation that disallows or trims white-space.

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and even a whole deck of cards complete with joker and back of card.

and a nice die emoji.

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, a Japanese variant of chess.

a list of characters that work on most terminals.