How to type Bitcoin symbol?
I remember it was about three years ago, that I was looking for a way so that I could type and my understanding at the time was that it would be probably just like typing all other characters and the only problem would be to find that symbol typed somewhere and just copy it, but boy was I mistaken. After a few googles, I found out that there not only didn't exist any font faces that supported Bitcoin symbol, also there was no standardization among the community either, as many people would either just use BTX, or BTC to represent the currency, or would probably just prefer to use borrowed substitutes like ฿ , or Ƀ.
Today I received the news that Unicode Consortium has made the final decision to open a tiny square on the huge unicode table for BTC symbol (hooooray!!). Now, people would probably have different tastes as what symbol, face or shape should be used to represent the character or is easier to write, that is not the problem anymore, because as long as they all point to the global standard U+20BF, anyone can use their own symbol to represent that character, and we would all be able to understand each other, thank you Unicode Consortium 😉.
It should be noted that using this symbol, has a prerequisite, and that is a font, like gnu unifont, or DejaVu font, or any other unicode supporting font, that has a shape on the address U+20BF, or else you would not be able to see that character. There are currently only very few fonts that have support for BTC symbol. Font Awesome is a BTC supporting font for example, but it seems that in Font Awesome, it is pointing to
U+F15A which is probably not a universally agreed upon address.
Now using the symbol would be easy from now on, here are a few examples in different programming languages, as how to access that character:
Mac & most linux Terminals:
echo -e \\u20bf
Windows Powershell:
[CHAR]0x20bf
HTML5:
₿
Python:
print (u'\u20bf')
C#:
string strW = null;
strW = Strings.ChrW(0x20bf);
Visual Basic .net:
Dim strW As String
strW = ChrW(&H20bf)
Again you have to remember that there are currently probably no fonts that have a character on that unicode address, but you can be sure that the moment a font is updated with that global symbol, and you have it installed, you would be able to easily type .
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