?
Question Mark
- Unicode
- U+003F
- Category
- Punctuation
- HTML Entity
- ?
- CSS
- \003F
The question mark (?) ends a direct question (Where are you?). Paired with an exclamation mark (?! or !?) it signals surprised disbelief, a lone ? in a chat asks for clarification, and in chess annotation ? marks a mistake and ?? a blunder. A question mark on screen in place of a letter, or a ? inside a black diamond (�), usually means a character that the font or the text encoding could not display. Spanish also opens questions with the inverted ¿.
On US and UK keyboards ? is Shift + the slash key, left of the right Shift. On iPhone it is on the 123 page; on Android on the ?123 page, and some Android keyboards also offer it on a long press of the full stop.
On US and UK keyboards ? is Shift + the slash key, left of the right Shift. On iPhone it is on the 123 page; on Android on the ?123 page, and some Android keyboards also offer it on a long press of the full stop.
How to Type
- Windows
- Shift+/ · Alt+63
- macOS
- Shift+/
- Linux
- Shift+/ · Ctrl+Shift+U 3f
- HTML
- ?
In Programming
In URLs ? starts the query string (/search?q=emoji). In regular expressions it makes the previous item optional (colou?r) and turns a quantifier lazy (.*?). C-family languages use it in the ternary operator (a ? b : c); JavaScript, C# and PHP have ?? for null coalescing, and JavaScript and C# have ?. for optional chaining (PHP writes ?->). In Rust a trailing ? passes an error up, SQL prepared statements use ? as a parameter placeholder, and shell globs match exactly one character with it.
Tags
question mark
question symbol
interrogation point
shift slash
alt 63
query string
keyboard symbol
punctuation
ascii