This character is a Other Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+204E forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it. The glyph can be confused with one other glyph.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The asterisk ( *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.
In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
8270
UTF-8
E2 81 8E
UTF-16
20 4E
UTF-32
00 00 20 4E
URL-Quoted
%E2%81%8E
HTML hex reference
⁎
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
âŽ
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 36 A9 38
RFC 5137
\u'204E'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u204E
C and C++
\u204E
C#
\u204E
CSS
\00204E
Excel
=UNICHAR(8270)
Go
\u204E
JavaScript
\u204E
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{204e}
JSON
\u204E
Java
\u204E
Lua
\u{204E}
Matlab
char(8270)
Perl
"\x{204E}"
PHP
\u{204e}
PostgreSQL
U&'\204E'
PowerShell
`u{204E}
Python
\u204E
Ruby
\u{204e}
Rust
\u{204e}
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