U+2400 Symbol for Null
U+2400 was added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993. It belongs to the block
This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+2400 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The null character (also null terminator) is a control character with the value zero. It is present in many character sets, including those defined by the Baudot and ITA2 codes, ISO/IEC 646 (or ASCII), the C0 control code, the Universal Coded Character Set (or Unicode), and EBCDIC. It is available in nearly all mainstream programming languages. It is often abbreviated as NUL (or NULL, though in some contexts that term is used for the null pointer). In 8-bit codes, it is known as a null byte.
The original meaning of this character was like NOP—when sent to a printer or a terminal, it has no effect (some terminals, however, incorrectly display it as space). When electromechanical teleprinters were used as computer output devices, one or more null characters were sent at the end of each printed line to allow time for the mechanism to return to the first printing position on the next line. On punched tape, the character is represented with no holes at all, so a new unpunched tape is initially filled with null characters, and often text could be inserted at a reserved space of null characters by punching the new characters into the tape over the nulls.
Today the character has much more significance in the programming language C and its derivatives and in many data formats, where it serves as a reserved character used to signify the end of a string, often called a null-terminated string. This allows the string to be any length with only the overhead of one byte; the alternative of storing a count requires either a string length limit of 255 or an overhead of more than one byte (there are other advantages/disadvantages described in the null-terminated string article).
Representations
System | Representation |
---|---|
Nº | 9216 |
UTF-8 | E2 90 80 |
UTF-16 | 24 00 |
UTF-32 | 00 00 24 00 |
URL-Quoted | %E2%90%80 |
HTML hex reference | ␀ |
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | †|
Elsewhere
Complete Record
Property | Value |
---|---|
1.1 (1993) | |
SYMBOL FOR NULL | |
GRAPHIC FOR NULL | |
Control Pictures | |
Other Symbol | |
Common | |
Other Neutral | |
Not Reordered | |
none | |
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|
✘ | |
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|
|
✘ | |
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
|
|
Any | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
0 | |
0 | |
0 | |
✘ | |
None | |
— | |
NA | |
Other | |
— | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Yes | |
Yes | |
|
|
Yes | |
|
|
Yes | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Other | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Other | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
|
|
None | |
neutral | |
Not Applicable | |
— | |
No_Joining_Group | |
Non Joining | |
Alphabetic | |
none | |
not a number | |
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U |