CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unicode
allo
allo

Reputation: 4236

Is there an "n/a" symbol in unicode?

Is there a unicode symbol for n/a? There are some fractions like ½, but an n/a symbol seems to be missing.

If there is none, what would be the most appropriate unicode symbol to use for n/a in a website (which should be contained in common fonts, to avoid needing a webfont)?

Upvotes: 33

Views: 27777

Answers (6)

Míng
Míng

Reputation: 2608

What about the "SYMBOL FOR NULL" ␀ (U+2400)?

Upvotes: 0

Rich
Rich

Reputation: 390

I see lots of answers going head-on at the "Not Applicable" abbreviation, without exploring what a symbol is. A quick search for the equivalent phrase "out of scope" brings up a couple of variations on the No symbol:    ⃠  – this seems to fit the bill (and since I was looking for a way to represent inapplicability, I'll be using it in my technical document).

Per the Wikipedia article, the Unicode codepoint U+20E0 is a combining character, so it is superimposed on the preceding character; e.g.  ! ⃠   overlays an exclamation point. To get it to appear isolated, use a non-breaking space  

If you don't want to bother with the combining symbol, the article mentions there's also an emoji U+1F6AB 🚫 but it's typically going to be colored red, or won't render!

Upvotes: 5

waldyrious
waldyrious

Reputation: 3844

There's actually a single character that could be repurposed for this: the "Square Na" character ㎁ (U+3381), which is used to represent the nanoampere in fullwidth (CJK) scripts.

Upvotes: 1

Dean Rather
Dean Rather

Reputation: 32394

There's a Negative Acknowlege icon...

␕ symbol for negative acknowledge 022025 9237 0x2415 ␕

Found by searching negative on the Unicode Lookup site.

I'm not a fan, and for my purposes have just gone with __N/A__ (Markdown..)

Upvotes: 5

Mike Mounier
Mike Mounier

Reputation: 267

For future reference, the fastest way I know to answer questions like the OP's when I have them myself is to go to unicodelookup.com, because of the way it works: there's a search bar at the top, and you just type a string and it will return any and all unicode characters containing that string (this is also a great way to discover new and useful symbols). So in the OP's case, he could proceed like this:

  • first try entering "not" (without the quotes) in the search field
  • visually scan through the results... doing so would not reveal a "not applicable" character in this case
  • try again but this time entering "applic" in the search field
  • again, doing so would not turn up anything along the lines of what he's looking for

At that point he would be reasonably confident the current Unicode standard does not have a "n/a" symbol.

If you use Firefox you can define a keyword like "uni" to search that site from the URL bar, meaning any time the browser is open and regardless of what page or site is currently showing, you could do this:

  • hit [F6]... this moves the cursor to the URL bar at the top
  • type something like "uni applic" and hit [Enter]... this brings up the unicodelookup.com website with the search results for "applic" already showing

For the above to work you would need to define your keyword ("uni" or wtv you prefer) to point to location http://unicodelookup.com/#%s.

Upvotes: 12

Remy Lebeau
Remy Lebeau

Reputation: 597215

Looking at the Unicode code charts, I do not see a single N/A symbol. I do, however, see ⁿ (U+207F) and ₐ (U+2090), which you could separate with / (U+002F) eg: ⁿ/ₐ, or ̷ (U+0337), eg: ⁿ̷ₐ, or ̸ (U+0338), eg: ⁿ̸ₐ. Probably not what you are hoping for, though. And I don't know if "common" fonts implement them, either.

Upvotes: 26

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