U+203B Reference Mark
U+203B was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block General Punctuation in the Basic Multilingual Plane.
This character is a Other Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as Japanese kome and Urdu paragraph separator.
The glyph is not a composition. Its width in East Asian texts is determined by its context. It can be displayed wide or narrow. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. If its East Asian Width is “narrow”, U+203B forms a word with similar characters, which prevents a line break inside it. Otherwise it allows line breaks around it, except in some numeric contexts.
The CLDR project calls this character “reference mark” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: mark, reference.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The reference mark or reference symbol "※" is a typographic mark or word used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) writing.
The symbol was used historically to call attention to an important sentence or idea, such as a prologue or footnote. As an indicator of a note, the mark serves the same purpose as the asterisk in English. However, in Japanese usage, the note text is placed directly into the main text immediately after the reference mark, rather than at the bottom of the page or end of chapter as is the case in English writing.
Representations
| System | Representation |
|---|---|
| Nº | 8251 |
| UTF-8 | E2 80 BB |
| UTF-16 | 20 3B |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 20 3B |
| URL-Quoted | %E2%80%BB |
| HTML hex reference | ※ |
| Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | ※ |
| alias | Japanese kome |
| alias | Urdu paragraph separator |
| Encoding: BIG5 (hex bytes) | A1 B0 |
| Encoding: BIG5HKSCS (hex bytes) | A1 B0 |
| Encoding: CP932 (hex bytes) | 81 A6 |
| Encoding: CP949 (hex bytes) | A1 D8 |
| Encoding: CP950 (hex bytes) | A1 B0 |
| Encoding: EUC_JP (hex bytes) | A2 A8 |
| Encoding: EUC_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | A2 A8 |
| Encoding: EUC_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | A2 A8 |
| Encoding: EUC_KR (hex bytes) | A1 D8 |
| Encoding: GB2312 (hex bytes) | A1 F9 |
| Encoding: GBK (hex bytes) | A1 F9 |
| Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) | A1 F9 |
| Encoding: HZ (hex bytes) | 7E 7B 21 79 7E 7D |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_1 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_2004 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_3 (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_JP_EXT (hex bytes) | 1B 24 42 22 28 1B 28 42 |
| Encoding: ISO2022_KR (hex bytes) | 1B 24 29 43 0E 21 58 0F |
| Encoding: JOHAB (hex bytes) | D9 68 |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS (hex bytes) | 81 A6 |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JIS_2004 (hex bytes) | 81 A6 |
| Encoding: SHIFT_JISX0213 (hex bytes) | 81 A6 |
| Adobe Glyph List | referencemark |
| digraph | :X |
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 1.1 (1993) | |
| REFERENCE MARK | |
| — | |
| General Punctuation | |
| Other Punctuation | |
| Common | |
| Other Neutral | |
| Not Reordered | |
| none | |
| Reference Mark | |
| ✘ | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Reference Mark | |
| ✘ | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Reference Mark | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| ✘ | |
| None | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Yes | |
| Reference Mark | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Reference Mark | |
| None | |
| ambiguous | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic) | |
| none | |
| not a number | |
| Reference Mark | |
| U |