Vertical bar

Vertical bar or pipe is the name of the ASCII character at position 124 (decimal). The character is depicted as either a solid vertical bar ("|") or a vertical bar with a break in the middle (broken bar "¦"). The character is usually depicted as a broken bar on IBM PC keyboards to distinguish it from other characters. However, today the "broken bar" is a separate character, U+00A6 (¦).

Table of contents

1 Usage: 1.1 Mathematics 1.2 Cursors 1.3 Wiki markup 1.4 Backus-Naur form 1.5 Unix 1.6 Regular Expression 1.7 Disjunction 2 Etymology

Usage:

Mathematics

• absolute value: , read "the absolute value of x".
• norms: , read "the norm of x sub one, x sub two".
• set definition , read "the set of x such that x is less than two". Often sets are written with a colon ':' rather than a vertical bar.
• conditional probability: , read "the probability of X given Y".

Wiki markup

Backus-Naur form

::= |

Unix

Regular Expression

Disjunction

Etymology