Unicode - Origin and Development - Architecture and Terminology - Character General Category

Character General Category

Each code point has a single General Category property. The major categories are: Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator and Other. Within these categories, there are subdivisions. The General Category is not useful for every use, since legacy encodings have used multiple characteristics per single code point. E.g. U+000A Line feed (LF) in ASCII is both a control and a formatting separator; in Unicode the General Category is "Other, Control". Often, other properties must be used to specify the characteristics and behaviour of a code point. The possible General Categories are:

General Category
Value Category Major, minor Basic type Character assigned Fixed Remarks
&000Letter
&001Lu Letter, uppercase Graphic Character
&002Ll Letter, lowercase Graphic Character
&003Lt Letter, titlecase Graphic Character
&004Lm Letter, modifier Graphic Character
&005Lo Letter, other Graphic Character
&010Mark
&011Mn Mark, nonspacing Graphic Character
&012Mc Mark, spacing combining Graphic Character
&013Me Mark, enclosing Graphic Character
&020Number
&021Nd Number, decimal digit Graphic Character All these, and only these, have Numeric Type = De
&022Nl Number, letter Graphic Character
&023No Number, other Graphic Character
&030Punctuation
&031Pc Punctuation, connector Graphic Character
&032Pd Punctuation, dash Graphic Character
&033Ps Punctuation, open Graphic Character
&034Pe Punctuation, close Graphic Character
&035Pi Punctuation, initial quote Graphic Character May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage
&036Pf Punctuation, final quote Graphic Character May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage
&037Po Punctuation, other Graphic Character
&040Symbol
&041Sm Symbol, math Graphic Character
&042Sc Symbol, currency Graphic Character
&043Sk Symbol, modifier Graphic Character
&044So Symbol, other Graphic Character
&050Separator
&051Zs Separator, space Graphic Character
&052Zl Separator, line Format Character Only U+2028 line separator (L​SEP)
&053Zp Separator, paragraph Format Character Only U+2029 paragraph separator (P​SEP)
&060Other
&061Cc Other, control Control Character Fixed 65 No name,
&062Cf Other, format Format Character
&063Cs Other, surrogate Surrogate Not (but abstract) Fixed 2048 No name,
&064Co Other, private use Private-use Not (but abstract) Fixed 6400 in BMP, 131,068 in Planes 15–16 No name,
&065Cn Other, not assigned Noncharacter Not Fixed 66 No name,
Reserved Not Not fixed No name,

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