U+206B "" Activate Symmetric Swapping Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
U+206B "" Activate Symmetric Swapping is a rarely used format control character designed for bidirectional text rendering, specifically intended to alter the display order of characters by swapping paired symmetrical elements, such as parentheses or brackets, around a central point in the text. Part of the deprecated ISO 10646 "activate symmetric swapping" function, it was meant to assist in arranging bidirectional scripts where mirrored glyphs appear in the wrong orientation, but in practice its implementation is inconsistent across modern systems and software, and it is generally considered a legacy feature that seldom affects actual text output.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+206B |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Activate Symmetric Swapping |
| Block | General Punctuation |
| General Category | Format |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Boundary Neutral |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding |  |
| HTML Hex Encoding |  |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE2 0x81 0xAB |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x206B |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000206B |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u206b |