―
Horizontal Bar
- Unicode
- U+2015
- Category
- Punctuation
- HTML Entity
- ―
- CSS
- \2015
The ― character is the horizontal bar, also called the quotation dash: it opens a line of dialogue in the many languages that set direct speech without quotation marks. It is a distinct character from the em dash —, even though the two look nearly identical: the bar runs slightly longer and, unlike the em dash, is not used as punctuation inside a sentence.
How to Type
- Windows
- Alt+8213 (numeric keypad)
- macOS
- Control+Command+Space, then search "horizontal bar"
- Linux
- Ctrl+Shift+U 2015
- HTML
- ― or ―
In Programming
No special meaning in code: it is plain Unicode U+2015, an ordinary character inside a string. Like the other long bars it is not equivalent to hyphen-minus, so it will not work in identifiers or operators.
Tags
horizontal bar
quotation dash
dialogue dash
direct speech dash
dash types
em dash
punctuation
copy dash
u+2015