BOX DRAWING CHARACTERS

'Box drawing characters', also known as 'line drawing characters', or 'pseudographics', are widely used in text user interfaces to draw various frames and boxes. In graphical user interfaces these characters are useless, because it is much simpler to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs; besides, box drawing characters work only with fixed-width (monospaced) fonts.
Unicode includes 128 such characters:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 2500   ─ ━ │ ┃ ┄ ┅ ┆ ┇ ┈ ┉ ┊ ┋ ┌ ┍ ┎ ┏ 2510   ┐ ┑ ┒ ┓ └ ┕ ┖ ┗ ┘ ┙ ┚ ┛ ├ ┝ ┞ ┟ 2520   ┠ ┡ ┢ ┣ ┤ ┥ ┦ ┧ ┨ ┩ ┪ ┫ ┬ ┭ ┮ ┯ 2530   ┰ ┱ ┲ ┳ ┴ ┵ ┶ ┷ ┸ ┹ ┺ ┻ ┼ ┽ ┾ ┿ 2540   ╀ ╁ ╂ ╃ ╄ ╅ ╆ ╇ ╈ ╉ ╊ ╋ ╌ ╍ ╎ ╏ 2550   ═ ║ ╒ ╓ ╔ ╕ ╖ ╗ ╘ ╙ ╚ ╛ ╜ ╝ ╞ ╟ 2560   ╠ ╡ ╢ ╣ ╤ ╥ ╦ ╧ ╨ ╩ ╪ ╫ ╬ ╭ ╮ ╯ 2570   ╰ ╱ ╲ ╳ ╴ ╵ ╶ ╷ ╸ ╹ ╺ ╻ ╼ ╽ ╾ ╿

'Unicode Box Drawing symbols'. A screenshot showing all 128 symbols, for web browsers that are unable to display them.

In all MS-DOS code pages, box drawing characters are present, but their number is limited to 40 (for example in code page 437):
Their number is futher limited to 22 on those code pages that use their places for other, usually alphabetic, characters (such as code page 850):
On many Unix systems, usually only 11 basic characters are available:
And on some terminals, they are not available at all, so they are replaced with ASCII characters that approximate box drawing characters, such as - (hyphen-minus), | (vertical bar) and + (plus sign).
Many microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s had their own proprietary character sets which also included box drawing characters. Some of these sets, such as Commodore's PETSCII, include box drawing symbols with no corresponding Unicode character.
Example box in Unicode:

┌─────────┐

│  ╔═══╗  │

│  ╚═╦═╝  │

╞═╤══╩══╤═╡

│ ├──┬──┤ │

│ └──┴──┘ │

└─────────┘

Contents

See also

See also

★ Character set

★ Unicode Symbols

★ Mapping of Unicode characters