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U+FF5F · Opening punctuation

Fullwidth Left White Parenthesis Symbol ⦅

⦅ is fullwidth left white parenthesis, U+FF5F. Unicode records it as a compatibility form of ⦅ (wide form). It was added in Unicode 3.2, and Unicode files it under Opening punctuation.

What Unicode says about ⦅

the most commonly occurring glyph variant looks like doubled parentheses

— annotation from the Unicode Standard, NamesList.txt

Codes & technical data

UnicodeU+FF5F
HTML hex⦅
HTML decimal⦅
CSS\FF5F
JavaScript\u{FF5F}
Python\U0000FF5F
Java / C#\uFF5F
Rust\u{ff5f}
Swift\u{FF5F}
PHP\u{FF5F}
URL encoded%EF%BD%9F
UTF-8 bytesEF BD 9F
UTF-16 bytesFF5F
Base64772f
Decimal65375
Decomposes to⦅ (wide form)
CategoryOpening punctuation (Ps)
IntroducedUnicode 3.2

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 parenthesis characters

Unicode names 13 characters ending in “parenthesis”. 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.

All 53 characters in Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms →

How to type ⦅

WindowsType FF5F then press Alt+X
macOSPress Ctrl+Cmd+Space, then search for “fullwidth left white parenthesis”
LinuxPress Ctrl+Shift+U, type ff5f, 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 white parenthesis symbol?
On Windows, type FF5F and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then ff5f. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
What is the code for ⦅?
Fullwidth Left White Parenthesis is U+FF5F. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
Will ⦅ survive being pasted anywhere?
Not always. Fullwidth Left White Parenthesis 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.