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What Is Unicode Punctuation?

Unicode organizes punctuation characters under the top-level General Category P (Punctuation), subdivided into six specific categories. Punctuation encompasses marks used to structure written language: paired delimiters, dashes, connectors, and miscellaneous marks that vary widely across the world's writing systems.

Unlike Latin-centric definitions of punctuation, Unicode's coverage includes CJK ideographic punctuation, Arabic quotation marks, Ethiopic wordspace, and hundreds of other culturally specific marks.

The Six Punctuation Subcategories

import unicodedata

punctuation_samples = [
    ("_",  "Pc - connector"),
    ("-",  "Pd - hyphen-minus"),
    ("–",  "Pd - en dash U+2013"),
    ("(",  "Ps - open paren"),
    (")",  "Pe - close paren"),
    ("「", "Ps - CJK left corner bracket"),
    ("」", "Pe - CJK right corner bracket"),
    ("\u201C", "Pi - left double quotation"),
    ("\u201D", "Pf - right double quotation"),
    ("«",  "Pi - left-pointing angle quotation"),
    ("»",  "Pf - right-pointing angle quotation"),
    ("。", "Po - CJK ideographic full stop"),
    ("，", "Po - fullwidth comma"),
    ("!",  "Po - exclamation mark"),
]

for char, label in punctuation_samples:
    gc = unicodedata.category(char)
    print(f"  U+{ord(char):04X}  {char}  {gc}  {label}")

CJK and Fullwidth Punctuation

East Asian writing uses a distinct set of punctuation marks designed for fullwidth (double-byte) layout:

• 。 (U+3002) IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP — sentence terminator in Chinese and Japanese
• 、 (U+3001) IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA — list separator
• 「」 (U+300C, U+300D) — Japanese corner brackets for quotation
• 『』 (U+300E, U+300F) — double corner brackets for nested quotation
• · (U+00B7) vs ・ (U+30FB) — Latin middle dot vs Katakana middle dot

Fullwidth versions of ASCII punctuation (U+FF01–U+FF0F) are compatibility equivalents of their halfwidth counterparts; NFKC normalization maps them back to ASCII.

Distinguishing Similar Punctuation

Many punctuation characters look similar but have different code points, names, and semantic roles:

Smart quote substitution in word processors converts ASCII ' and " to their Pi/Pf counterparts. This can cause problems in code contexts where the apostrophe is syntactically significant.

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