General Punctuation


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 interobang, 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 and U+205F differ by horizontal width, while U+2000 and U+2001 are effectively aliases of U+2002 and U+2003, respectively; another two, U+202F and U+2060 are variants of U+2009 or U+2004 and U+200B that prohibit line-breaks.
Three zero-width characters U+200B through U+200D differ in how they affect ligation and shaping of adjacent letters.
Eleven invisible characters U+200E, U+200F, U+202A through U+202E and U+2066 through U+2069 control the directionality of text unless higher-level markup overrides them.
There are explicit line and paragraph separators at U+2018 and U+2019.

Emoji

The General Punctuation block contains two emoji:
U+203C and U+2049.
The block has four standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style or text presentation for the
two emoji, both of which default to a text presentation.
U+203C2049
base code point‼⁉
base+VS15
base+VS16

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the General Punctuation block: