U+FE63 SMALL HYPHEN-MINUS

U+FE63 was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Small Form Variants in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Dash Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is a Small composition of the glyphs . It has a Wide East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as European Separator and is not mirrored. In text U+FE63 behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type SContinue for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The hyphen-minus (-) is a character used in digital documents and computing to represent a hyphen (‐) or a minus sign (−). It is present in Unicode as code point U+002D - hyphen-minus; it is also in ASCII with the same value.

The use of one character for hyphen and minus, and sometimes also for en dash, was a compromise made in the early days of fixed-width typewriters and computer displays. However, in proper typesetting and graphic design, there are distinct characters for hyphens, dashes, and the minus sign. Usage of the hyphen-minus nonetheless persists in many contexts, as it is well-known, easy to enter on keyboards, and in the same location in all common character sets.

Most programming languages, restricting themselves to ASCII, use the hyphen-minus, rather than the Unicode character U+2212 − minus sign, for denoting subtraction and negative numbers.

The en-dash is historically a dash of the same width as a lowercase letter "n". The en-dash indicates ranges, such as 2000–2004, and compound adjectives, as in "Italian–American relations" (having to do with the relationship between Italy and America), as opposed to "Italian-American relations" (indicating relatives who are Americans of Italian descent). Hyphen-minuses are often used instead of en-dashes in these cases, but this practice generally stems from ignorance of the en-dash and is not preferred.

Historically, an em dash is the width of a lowercase letter "m", and may be represented by three hyphen-minus signs in succession (as later in TeX markup), or sometimes two.