Yen sign


The yen or yuan sign, ¥, is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Western scripts. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example:, unlike the kanji/Chinese character, which is more commonly used in Japanese and Chinese and is written following the amount: in Japan and in China.

Code points

The Unicode code point is. Additionally, there is a full width character,, at code point for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts.
There was no code-point for this symbol in the original US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the ISO/IEC 8859-1 character set assigned code point to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.
In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point to the latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII. This standard was widely adopted in Japan.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft adopted the ISO code in Windows-1252 for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use the code page 932 character encoding, which is a variant of Shift JIS. Hence, 0x5C is displayed as a yen sign in Japanese-locale fonts on Windows. It is nonetheless used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character and as the general escape character. It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS, while Unicode U+00A5 YEN SIGN is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932, and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932, essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts. The won sign has similar issues in Korean versions of Windows.

IBM EBCDIC

IBM's Code page 437 used code point for the ¥ and this encoding was also used by several other computer systems. The ¥ is assigned code point B2 in EBCDIC 500 and many other EBCDIC code pages.

Chinese IME

Under Chinese Pinyin input method editors such as those from Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing displays the full-width character, which is different from half-width used in Japanese IMEs.

円 and 元

The Japanese kanji and Chinese character are more commonly used when writing in Japanese and Chinese.