U+00A6 · Latin-1 Supplement

Broken Bar ¦

The broken bar is a vertical line with a gap in the middle. It exists largely for historical reasons: older keyboards and code pages printed the ASCII vertical bar with a gap, and when the two were separated in later standards, both survived. Today it is used mainly as a decorative separator, in some dictionary notations, and in text art.

WindowsAlt 0166

UnicodeU+00A6

HTML¦

¦U+00A6

Character codes

Unicode code point	`U+00A6`
Decimal	`166`
HTML named entity	`¦`
HTML (hex)	`¦`
HTML (decimal)	`¦`
CSS	`\00A6`
JavaScript	`\u00A6`
Python	`\u00A6`
UTF-8 bytes	`C2 A6`
UTF-16	`00A6`
URL-encoded	`%C2%A6`

Character details

Official name	BROKEN BAR
Unicode block	Latin-1 Supplement
General category	Other Symbol (So)
SymbolHero category	Punctuation
Emoji	No

How to type ¦

Windows

Hold Alt and type 0166 on the numeric keypad (Num Lock on), then release Alt. Alt 0166 uses the Windows-1252 code page.
In Microsoft Word or Outlook: type 00A6 then press Alt + X.
Open Character Map (search “Character Map” in Start), tick “Advanced view”, search for “broken bar”, then Select and Copy.

Mac

Press Control + Command + Space to open the Character Viewer, search “broken bar”, and double-click the result.
With the Unicode Hex Input keyboard enabled (System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources), hold Option and type 00A6.

iPhone & Android

Tap Copy at the top of this page, then long-press where you want it and choose Paste.

Docs & web

Google Docs: Insert → Special characters, then search “broken bar” or enter U+00A6.
HTML: ¦ or ¦
Excel / Google Sheets: =UNICHAR(166)

Examples

Home ¦ About ¦ Contact
Menu: Starters ¦ Mains ¦ Desserts
Column A ¦ Column B

Good to know

Don’t mix it up: Often confused with the vertical line | (U+007C), which is the solid character used in programming, pipes, and tables; code will not accept ¦ in its place.

Tip: Never use ¦ in shell commands, Markdown tables, or code where a pipe | is expected.

Display: the character itself is always the same code point, but its shape comes from the font on the device showing it. If you see an empty box, the font lacks this glyph—the text is still correct.