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 interrobang, 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 such as contextual forms in Arabic.
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+2028 and U+2029.
Variation selectors
This block has variation sequences defined for East Asian punctuation positional variants of the curly quotation marks .and are used for East Asian punctuation positional variants.
is used for Sibe positional variants.
| U+ | 2018 | 2019 | 201C | 201D | Description |
| base code point | ‘ | ’ | “ | ” | |
| base + VS01 | ‘︀ | ’︀ | “︀ | ”︀ | non-fullwidth form |
| base + VS02 | ‘︁ | ’︁ | “︁ | ”︁ | justified fullwidth form |
| base + VS03 | ‘︂ | ’︂ | “︂ | ”︂ | Sibe form |
The non-fullwidth forms are expected to be separated with a space on one side, the fullwidth forms are not:
In vertical text, the fullwidth forms should display somewhat differently, and even as regular CJK quotation marks 「...」 and 『...』 if the vertical orientation property is set to "Hans":
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+ | 203C | 2049 |
| base code point | ‼ | ⁉ |
| base+VS15 | ||
| base+VS16 |