What ␜ means
It marks a boundary between large units of structured data.
FS stands for “file separator.” ASCII, an early standard for encoding text, includes controls that organize data rather than print letters. ␜ gives one of those controls a visible label; the F and S are drawn together as one character.
The separator hierarchy runs from file to group to record to unit, abbreviated FS, GS, RS and US. Think of larger bundles containing smaller pieces: FS marks the highest level. The data format decides what each bundle contains and what “file” means here.
Part of the collection
Worth knowing
- The invisible control predates its Unicode picture: ASCII called it S4 in 1963 and FS in 1967. IS4 means “information separator four,” its place in the separator hierarchy.
Questions people ask
1Why does ␜ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Control Pictures block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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How to type or find ␜
- Search it as
- FS symbol · file separator · visible file separator · F S symbol · control picture · ASCII FS · IS4 · S4
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
␜\241CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.