Finance:Yen sign
| ¥ | |
|---|---|
yen, yuan sign | |
| In Unicode | U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (HTML ¥ · ¥) |
| Currency | |
| Currency | Japanese yen, Chinese yuan |
| Graphical variants | |
| ￥ | |
| U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN | |
 Category | |
The yen or yuan sign, ¥, is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Western scripts. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example: ¥50, unlike the kanji/Chinese character, which is more commonly used in Japanese and Chinese and is written following the amount: 50円 in Japan and 50元 in China.
Code points
The Unicode code point is U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (HTML ¥ · ¥). Additionally, there is a full width character, ￥, at code point U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN (HTML ￥)[lower-alpha 1] for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts.
There was no code-point for this symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned 5C (allocated to the backslash (\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code point A5 to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.
In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point 0x5C to the latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII. This standard was widely adopted in Japan.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft adopted the ISO code A5 in Windows-1252 for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use the code page 932 character encoding, which is a variant of Shift JIS. Hence, 0x5C is displayed as a yen sign in Japanese-locale fonts on Windows.[1] It is nonetheless used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character (for example, in C:¥) and as the general escape character (¥n).[1] It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash),[2] while Unicode U+00A5 YEN SIGN is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932,[1] and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932,[3] essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts. The won sign has similar issues in Korean versions of Windows.
IBM EBCDIC
IBM's Code page 437 used code point 9D for the ¥ and this encoding was also used by several other computer systems. The ¥ is assigned code point B2 in EBCDIC 500 and many other EBCDIC code pages.
Chinese IME
Under Chinese Pinyin input method editors (IMEs) such as those from Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing displays the full-width character ￥, which is different from half-width ¥ used in Japanese IMEs.
円 and 元
The Japanese kanji 円 (yen) and Chinese character 元 (yuan) are more commonly used when writing in Japanese and Chinese.
Notes
- ↑ In the block "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms"
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Kaplan, Michael S. (2005-09-17). "When is a backslash not a backslash?". http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.html.
- ↑ "CP932.TXT". Unicode Consortium. https://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/CP932.TXT.
- ↑ "Lead byte NULL — Code page 932". Microsoft. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc194889.aspx.
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