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  • 16-11-2019 2:26pm
    #1
    vriesmays
    Registered Users Posts: 1,570 ✭✭✭


    What's the difference between | and ¦ on the keyboard. Have they got different uses in programming or in MS Office. Are they for Windows or for the older operating systems.


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    #2
    ED E
    Registered Users Posts: 36,164 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    Wikipedia answers your query.
    Solid vertical bar vs broken bar
    Many early video terminals and dot-matrix printers rendered the vertical bar character as the allograph broken bar (¦). This may have been to distinguish the character from the lower-case 'L' and the upper-case 'I' on these limited-resolution devices. It may also have been designed so a vertical column drew a more attractive small-dash line, and to match the appearance of a horizontal line of dash characters (----).[citation needed]

    Some variants of EBCDIC included both versions of the character as different code points. The broad implementation of the extended ASCII ISO/IEC 8859 series in the 1990s made a distinction between the two forms. This was preserved in Unicode as a separate character, U+00A6 ¦ BROKEN BAR (166decimal) (the term "parted rule" is used sometimes in Unicode documentation).

    Many keyboards display the broken bar on a keycap even though the solid vertical bar character is produced. This includes older IBM PC keyboards, and many German QWERTZ keyboards. The UK keyboard layout is actually documented as producing the broken bar but produces the solid bar on most systems, including Microsoft Windows.

    The broken bar character can be typed (depending on the layout) as AltGr+` or AltGr+6 or AltGr+⇧ Shift+Right \on Windows and Compose!^ on Linux. It can be inserted into HTML as ¦

    Many fonts draw the characters the same (both are solid vertical bars, or both are broken vertical bars).[6] The broken bar has hardly any practical application and does not appear to have any clearly identified uses distinct from the vertical bar.[7] In non-computing use — for example in mathematics, physics and general typography — the broken bar is not an acceptable substitute for the vertical bar.

    In common character maps


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