Talk:Vertical bar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The character is usually depicted as a broken bar on IBM PC keyboards to distinguish it from other characters."

On a PC keyboard with a UK layout, the broken bar and solid bar both appear. The broken bar is to the left of the Z, and is the shifted version of a backslash. The solid bar is obtained by holding down AltGr and selecting the ` key (which appears above Tab and to the left of the 1 key).

The weird thing is, though, that pressing the broken bar key produces a solid bar symbol on screen, while pressing the solid bar key produces a broken bar symbol on screen. So the | key produces the ¦ symbol, and vice versa. This behaviour appears to be consistent across different PCs and both on Windows and in a DOS window. Whoever invented this system must have been absolutely nuts. -86.136.26.129 19:02, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

The distinction between the vertical bar and the broken bar originated in EBCDIC. No idea what they were thinking. ISO 8859, Unicode, as well as the British Standard keyboard layout all aimed to cover EBCDIC and hence inherited this useless character. (That's also where ¬ comes from!) Since there is no known practical application for the broken bar character, most UK keyboard drivers today map both the broken and the unbroken bar to the ASCII character |. Markus Kuhn 21:31, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
What's the AltGr key??? --154.20.102.96 04:56, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
The AltGr key is a modifier key typically located immediately right of the spacebar on a normal PC keyboard. In case your keyboard is missing it, it can be simulated by holding down the Alt and Ctrl keys together. JIP | Talk 12:28, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Markus, but is there any evidence for the idea that most UK keyboard drivers map both bar keys to the same ASCII character? I don't remember ever using a UK system where they were mapped to the same character (except when using linux instead of Windows), although the key with the solid bar printed on it is always mapped to the broken bar character, and vice versa. 15:37, 10 September 2007 (UTC)~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.136.182 (talk)

Contents

[edit] Thank you!!!

I am not a newbie user but I have been puzzling over this character for years!!! I have never needed to know it but I could never figure it out either! Its so widely known that I could not find any help for finding the character. Everything assumed you knew where the fudge it was. They never taught this in my computer classes back in the stone age and I felt silly asking other people I knew. Thanks to whomever for finally letting this moron know where the fudge to find this character.

I, too, found it suddenly on a computer...I wondered why Wikipedia would use a character not on a keyboard...

Lunakeet —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lunakeet (talk • contribs) 15:03, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Format?

I think the introduction for this artical should be moved to the body somewhere as it doesnt really introduce the symbol.

[edit] Unsubtle anti-Blair comment?

From the discussion of Unix pipes:

egrep -i 'blair' filename.log | sed 's/be clear/lie/g' | more

Or am I missing something? Richard W.M. Jones 17:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Same as the dãṛi?

I'm not sure, but I would think that the dãṛi (।) used in many languages of South Asia would count as a variant of the vertical bar. In those languages, the use of । is equivalent to that of the period/full stop of European languages. Thoughts? --SameerKhan (talk) 18:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] vertical bar in wiki

Sould be also section about use of vertical bar in wiki:

  • specification of journal cites, book cites
  • specification of figures included
  • specification of personalias.

dima (talk) 04:47, 31 March 2008 (UTC)