General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic and novel punctuation such as the interrobang, and invisible mathematical operators.
Additional punctuation characters are in the Supplemental Punctuation block and sprinkled in dozens of other Unicode blocks.
Block
Several characters in this block are usually not rendered with a directly visible glyph. Ten whitespace characters—U+2002 through U+200B (fixed en or 1⁄2 em, em, 1⁄3 em, 1⁄4 em, 1⁄6 em, figure and punctuation space, variable thin or 1⁄5 em and hair space, fixed zero-width space)—and U+205F (math medium or 2⁄9 em space) differ by horizontal width, while U+2000 and U+2001 (en and em quad) are effectively aliases of U+2002 and U+2003, respectively; another two, U+202F and U+2060 (ill-termed word joiner), are variants of U+2009 or U+2004 and U+200B that prohibit line breaks. Three zero-width characters, U+200B through U+200D (space, non-joiner and joiner), differ in how they affect ligation and shaping of adjacent letters such as contextual forms in Arabic. Eleven invisible characters—U+200E, U+200F (left-to-right and right-to-left mark), U+202A through U+202E (embeds, pops and overrides) and U+2066 through U+2069 (isolates)—control the directionality of text unless higher-level markup overrides them. There are explicit line and paragraph separators at U+2028 and U+2029.
Variation selectors This block has variation sequences defined for East Asian punctuation positional variants of the curly quotation marks . (VS01) and (VS02) are used for East Asian punctuation positional variants. (VS03) is used for Sibe positional variants. Variation sequences for fullwidth quotation marks U+ 2018 2019 201C 201D Description base code point ‘ ’ “ ” base + VS01 ‘︀ ’︀ “︀ ”︀ non-fullwidth form base + VS02 ‘︁ ’︁ “︁ ”︁ justified fullwidth form base + VS03 ‘︂ ’︂ “︂ ”︂ Sibe form
The non-fullwidth forms are expected to be separated with a space on one side, the fullwidth forms are not:
In vertical text, the fullwidth forms should display somewhat differently, and even as regular CJK quotation marks 「...」 and 『...』 if the vertical orientation property is set to "Hans":
Emoji
The General Punctuation block contains two emoji: U+203C and U+2049.
The block has four standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for the two emoji, both of which default to a text presentation.
Emoji variation sequences U+ 203C 2049 base code point ‼ ⁉ base+VS15 (text) base+VS16 (emoji)
History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the General Punctuation block:
Version Count UTC ID L2 ID WG2 ID Document 1.0.0 U+2000..202E, 2030..203E, 2040..2044 67 (to be determined) N4182 1.1 U+203F, 2045..2046 3 (to be determined) U+206A..206F 6 (to be determined) 3.0 U+202F, 2048..2049 3 N1603 N1711 N1734 txt) doc) html, txt) doc) html) N1862 N1865 N1918 html, doc) N1973 html, doc) N2020 N2003 N2126 N2103 N4182 N4752R2 N4753 N4763 N4769 U+204A 1 N1747 html) html, Figure 1) N1840 N1847 doc) N1920 html, doc) U+204B..204D 3 N1748 html) html, Figure 1) N1840 N1847 doc) N1920 html, doc) 3.2 U+2047, 2051 2 N2092 N2195 N2191R txt) N2257 N2278 N2253 U+204E..2050, 2057, 205F, 2061..2062 7 N2191R txt) U+2052, 2063 2 N2336 N2356 doc) U+2060 1 N2235 N2253 4.0 U+2053..2054 2 N2419 N2442 4.1 U+2055 1 U+2056, 2058..2059 3 N2610R N2642 U+205A..205C 3 U+205D 1 N2642 U+205E 1 N2655 5.1 U+2064 1 N3198R doc) 6.3 U+2066..2069 4 N4310 N4447
References