U+FF97 "ラ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ra Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

U+FF97 "ラ" Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ra is a typographic variant of the fullwidth katakana character ラ (U+30E9), representing the syllable "ra" and designed to occupy half the usual character width for compatibility with legacy computer systems and monospaced text environments. It is part of the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block, which was created to map to older character encodings like Shift JIS that used narrower glyphs for certain characters in constrained terminal displays or early digital fonts. While visually identical in shape to its fullwidth counterpart, its narrower form allows it to align with Latin characters in fixed-width contexts, though it is now less commonly used in modern text due to the prevalence of Unicode's fullwidth standard.

General Properties

Code Point U+FF97
Version Added 1.1
Name Halfwidth Katakana Letter Ra
Block Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms
General Category Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right
Decomposition Type Narrow
Decomposition Mapping "ラ" U+30E9 Katakana Letter Ra

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ラ
HTML Hex Encoding ラ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xEF 0xBE 0x97
UTF-16 Encoding 0xFF97
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000FF97
C/C++/Java Escape \uff97

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value NaN
Line Break Ideographic
East Asian Width Halfwidth
Changes When NFKC Casefolded Yes
NFKC Casefold "ラ" U+30E9 Katakana Letter Ra
NFKC Simple Casefold "ラ" U+30E9 Katakana Letter Ra
Script Katakana
Script Extensions Katakana
Indic Syllabic Category Other
ID Start Yes
XID Start Yes
ID Continue Yes
XID Continue Yes
Alphabetic Yes
Vertical Orientation Rotated
Grapheme Base Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break Other
Word Break Katakana
Sentence Break OLetter