[
Left Square Bracket
- Unicode
- U+005B
- Category
- Punctuation
- HTML Entity
- [
- CSS
- \005B
The left square bracket ([), simply called a bracket in American English, encloses words an editor adds to a quotation ("She [the CEO] agreed") and the note [sic] that flags an error in the original. It holds reference numbers in academic papers and on Wikipedia [1], marks a nested aside inside parentheses, and in mathematics opens a closed interval [0, 1] or a matrix. It always pairs with ].
On US and UK keyboards [ has its own key right of P; with Shift the same key gives {. On iPhone it is on the #+= page, on Android on the =\< page.
On US and UK keyboards [ has its own key right of P; with Shift the same key gives {. On iPhone it is on the #+= page, on Android on the =\< page.
How to Type
- Windows
- [ key (right of P) · Alt+91
- macOS
- [ key (right of P)
- Linux
- [ key · Ctrl+Shift+U 5b
- HTML
- [
In Programming
Square brackets build arrays and lists ([1, 2, 3]) and index into them (items[0], user['name']) in Python, JavaScript, PHP and most other languages; in Python they also slice (a[1:3]) and wrap list comprehensions. In regular expressions [ opens a character class ([a-z]). In Bash [ is the test command, which is why [ -f file ] needs its spaces, and in Markdown [text](url) makes a link. JSON arrays and INI or TOML section headers use them too.
Tags
left square bracket
opening square bracket
square bracket
open bracket
brackets
alt 91
keyboard symbol
punctuation
ascii