Broken Bar

Broken Bar is part of the Latin-1 Supplement block, primarily used for Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and others) that need accented letters or region-specific punctuation beyond plain ASCII.

Unicode block: Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF). This block extends ASCII with accented Latin letters, currency signs, and legal symbols. It maps directly onto ISO 8859-1 ("Latin-1"), the dominant Western-European text encoding of the 1990s, which is why Windows Alt codes for this range still work today.

At Unicode code point U+00A6 (decimal 166), Broken Bar is the 6th of 95 characters cataloged in this category on How To Type Any Symbol. In terms of typing methods, it has a documented Windows Alt code, though no dedicated single-key Mac shortcut — Mac users generally rely on copy-paste for it. Regardless of platform, clicking the copy button above places the exact character on your clipboard, ready to paste into any application that accepts Unicode text.

💡 Good to know: Some fonts render Latin-1 Supplement characters with a different weight or spacing than base Latin letters — worth checking in headlines or logos.