U+0096 "SPA" START OF GUARDED AREA Unicode Character

U+0096 "SPA" START OF GUARDED AREA is a control character originally defined by the C1 set of ISO/IEC 6429, designed to mark the beginning of a guarded area or protected field in text, typically within a stream of data for terminal or printing systems. It serves as a delimiter that instructs a device to treat the following sequence as protected from certain types of processing, such as line breaking or editing, until an END OF GUARDED AREA character is encountered. In modern contexts, this character is rarely used and often appears as a fallback representation in text that has been converted from legacy systems, as it does not have a standard visible glyph and is primarily relevant to historical data processing protocols.

General Properties

Code Point	U+0096
Version Added	1.1
Unicode 1.0 Name	Start of Guarded Area
Block	Latin-1 Supplement
General Category	Control
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Boundary Neutral
Alias	SPA (abbreviation) START OF GUARDED AREA (control) START OF PROTECTED AREA (control)

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	–
HTML Hex Encoding	–
UTF-8 Encoding	0xC2 0x96
UTF-16 Encoding	0x0096
UTF-32 Encoding	0x00000096
C/C++/Java Escape	\u0096

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Combining Mark
Script	Common
Script Extensions	Common
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Cluster Break	Control
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Other