Vertical bar
Phonetics and orthography
In the Khoisan languages and the International Phonetic Alphabet, the vertical bar is used to write the dental click (ǀ). A double vertical bar is used to write the alveolar lateral click (ǁ). Since these are technically letters, they have their own Unicode code points in the Latin Extended-B range: U+01C0 for the single bar and U+01C1 for the double bar. Longer single and double vertical bars are used to mark prosodic boundaries in the IPA.
Encoding
The vertical bar ("|") is at position 124 (decimal) in the ASCII character set. The broken bar ("¦") is not part of ASCII but is a separate character that appeared (along with vertical bar) first in the EBCDIC family of character sets, and was copied from there into ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.
The typical computer keyboard used in the United Kingdom features separate keys for "vertical bar" and "broken bar", even though "broken bar" has hardly any practical application. Some keyboard drivers map the broken bar key to the vertical bar, and the vertical bar key, shared with the grave accent (`), generates the broken bar when pressed in combination with AltGr.
In common character maps
| Vertical bar ('|') | Broken bar ('¦') | |
|---|---|---|
| ASCII | decimal (base-10): 124 hexadecimal (base-16): 7C |
N/A |
| ISO/IEC 8859-1 | hexadecimal: 7C | hexadecimal: A6 |
| Unicode | U+007C | U+00A6 |
| EBCDIC (CCSID 500 variant) | hexadecimal: BB | hexadecimal: A6 |
| Shift-JIS Men-Ku-Ten | 1-01-35 |
Additional related Unicode characters:
- Double vertical line ('‖'): U+2016
- Latin letter dental click ('ǀ'): U+01C0
- Latin letter lateral click ('ǁ'): U+01C1
- Various box-drawing characters at U+2500 to U+257F
References
See also
