U+2500 · Other symbol
HTML entity
─
Box Drawings Light Horizontal Symbol ─
─ is box drawings light horizontal, U+2500. Unicode also records it as “Videotex Mosaic DG 15”. It was added in Unicode 1.1, and Unicode files it under Other symbol.
Also known as
- Videotex Mosaic DG 15
Unicode 1.0 called this character forms light horizontal. The standard renamed it later, but documents, fonts and font-editing tools from that era still use the old name.
Codes & technical data
| Unicode | U+2500 | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML hex | ─ | |
| HTML decimal | ─ | |
| CSS | \2500 | |
| JavaScript | \u{2500} | |
| Python | \U00002500 | |
| Java / C# | \u2500 | |
| Rust | \u{2500} | |
| Swift | \u{2500} | |
| PHP | \u{2500} | |
| URL encoded | %E2%94%80 | |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 94 80 | |
| UTF-16 bytes | 2500 | |
| Base64 | 4pSA | |
| Decimal | 9472 | |
| HTML entity | ─ | |
| Category | Other symbol (So) | |
| Introduced | Unicode 1.1 | |
Will ─ survive being pasted?
- Normalisation. Yes. ─ is unchanged by NFKC, so it survives normalising systems intact.
- Legacy encodings. ─ is Unicode-only — it has no Latin-1 equivalent, so a system stuck on an 8-bit encoding cannot represent it.
- Size. 3 bytes in UTF-8. Character-limited fields — SMS, bios, some form validators — usually count bytes, not characters.
Unicode cross-references
The standard points readers of ─ at these characters — usually because they look alike, or because one is the correct choice where the other is often used by mistake.
Other drawings characters
Unicode names 24 characters ending in “drawings”. They differ by direction, weight or decoration rather than by meaning.
Nearby in Box Drawing
The line-drawing characters that terminal interfaces were built from before graphics. Single, double, heavy and rounded corners, in every junction combination — still the standard way to draw a table in a monospace font.
How to type ─
| Windows | Type 2500 then press Alt+X |
|---|---|
| macOS | Press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, then search for “box drawings light horizontal” |
| Linux | Press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2500, press Enter |
| HTML | ─ |
About Unicode’s Other symbol category
Unicode files this under "other symbol" — the catch-all for pictographs, signs and marks that are neither maths, currency, nor letter-like. It is the largest symbol category in the standard.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I type the ─ box drawings light horizontal symbol?
- On Windows, type 2500 and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then 2500. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
- What is the code for ─?
- Box Drawings Light Horizontal is U+2500, written in HTML as ─. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
- What kind of character is ─?
- Box Drawings Light Horizontal is filed under Other symbol in the Box Drawing block, and was introduced in Unicode 1.1. Unicode files this under "other symbol" — the catch-all for pictographs, signs and marks that are neither maths, currency, nor letter-like. It is the largest symbol category in the standard.