This character is a Other Symbol 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+2731 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
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
10033
UTF-8
E2 9C B1
UTF-16
27 31
UTF-32
00 00 27 31
URL-Quoted
%E2%9C%B1
HTML hex reference
✱
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
✱
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 37 C0 37
LATEX
\ding{81}
RFC 5137
\u'2731'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u2731
C and C++
\u2731
C#
\u2731
CSS
\002731
Excel
=UNICHAR(10033)
Go
\u2731
JavaScript
\u2731
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{2731}
JSON
\u2731
Java
\u2731
Lua
\u{2731}
Matlab
char(10033)
Perl
"\x{2731}"
PHP
\u{2731}
PostgreSQL
U&'\2731'
PowerShell
`u{2731}
Python
\u2731
Ruby
\u{2731}
Rust
\u{2731}
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