U+FF5B · Opening punctuation
Fullwidth Left Curly Bracket Symbol ｛
｛ is fullwidth left curly bracket, U+FF5B. Unicode records it as a compatibility form of { (wide form). It was added in Unicode 1.1, and Unicode files it under Opening punctuation.
Also known as
Unicode 1.0 called this character fullwidth opening curly bracket. 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+FF5B | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML hex | ｛ | |
| HTML decimal | ｛ | |
| CSS | \FF5B | |
| JavaScript | \u{FF5B} | |
| Python | \U0000FF5B | |
| Java / C# | \uFF5B | |
| Rust | \u{ff5b} | |
| Swift | \u{FF5B} | |
| PHP | \u{FF5B} | |
| URL encoded | %EF%BD%9B | |
| UTF-8 bytes | EF BD 9B | |
| UTF-16 bytes | FF5B | |
| Base64 | 772b | |
| Decimal | 65371 | |
| Decomposes to | { (wide form) | |
| Category | Opening punctuation (Ps) | |
| Introduced | Unicode 1.1 | |
Will ｛ survive being pasted?
- Normalisation. No. Anything that applies NFKC — search indexes, usernames, domain names, programming identifiers — rewrites ｛ as
{. Safe for display, not for storage. - 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.
Other bracket characters
Unicode names 24 characters ending in “bracket”. They differ by direction, weight or decoration rather than by meaning.
Nearby in Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
Latin characters at the width of a CJK ideograph, and katakana at half width — a compatibility block for legacy East Asian encodings. Fullwidth text is often used online for a spaced-out aesthetic; it normalises straight back to ASCII.
How to type ｛
| Windows | Type FF5B then press Alt+X |
|---|---|
| macOS | Press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, then search for “fullwidth left curly bracket” |
| Linux | Press Ctrl+Shift+U, type ff5b, press Enter |
| HTML | ｛ |
About Unicode’s Opening punctuation category
This is an opening bracket. Editors that highlight matching pairs, and bidirectional text algorithms, both key off this category rather than off the glyph.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I type the ｛ fullwidth left curly bracket symbol?
- On Windows, type FF5B and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then ff5b. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
- What is the code for ｛?
- Fullwidth Left Curly Bracket is U+FF5B. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
- Will ｛ survive being pasted anywhere?
- Not always. Fullwidth Left Curly Bracket is a compatibility character: any system that applies Unicode NFKC normalisation — search indexes, usernames, identifiers — replaces it with {. Use it for display, not where text is normalised.