What 󠆺 means
Place it only after the Han character named in a registered sequence.
VS203 has no visible shape on its own. A variation sequence pairs a Han character with one selector; only listed pairs define which form it requests. Adding VS203 after an unrelated character has no defined effect.
Unicode has a short series of general-use selectors and a supplementary series for ideographic variants, such as Han-character forms. A registered pair can preserve a written form in plain text without encoding every shape as a new character. In historical-script research, a pair can record that a particular glyph is treated as a variant of a base character. The number 203 is not a style code; the pair identifies the requested form.
Why does this selector disappear?
An unsupported pair leaves the base character in its ordinary form.
An ideographic selector takes effect only immediately after its base and only in a registered sequence. If software does not recognize the pair, the selector stays invisible and the base is displayed as usual. If a font lacks a glyph for a defined pair, fallback may still show the ordinary Han character.
Technical and invisible: it requests a defined ideograph form as part of a pair, with no separate message content.
Alone, it cannot choose a glyph or show a symbol.
Part of the collection
Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Why does 󠆺 show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Variation Selectors Supplement 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
9
How to type or find 󠆺
- Also called
- VS203
- Search it as
- IVS · U+E01BA · invisible character · ideographic variation sequence · variation sequence
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
󠆺\E01BAE01BA using that feature, then place it after the base Han character in a registered sequence.󠆺 after the base Han character; the entity becomes the selector when the page is parsed.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.