U2011

U+2011, known as the Non-Breaking Hyphen, is a Unicode code point in the General Punctuation block. It functions as a hyphen that should not permit a line break at its position, allowing a hyphenated term to stay intact on a line when possible. Visually it resembles a standard hyphen but is treated by text layout engines as non-breaking.

Encoding and representation: In UTF-8, U+2011 encodes as the three-byte sequence E2 80 91. In UTF-16, it is represented as the single code unit 0x2011 (big endian 0x20 0x11, little endian 0x11 0x20). In HTML, it can be inserted with a numeric character reference such as ‑ or ‑ (decimal 8209).

Usage and behavior: The non-breaking hyphen is used where a hyphen is required for readability but a break at the hyphen is undesirable. This can occur in certain compound terms, technical identifiers, or when presenting numbers and strings that should remain visually connected. It differs from the soft hyphen (U+00AD), which indicates a potential break point rather than preventing one, and from a regular hyphen (U+2010), which may be a break point depending on the line-breaking algorithm.

See also: Hyphen (U+2010), Soft Hyphen (U+00AD), Non-breaking Space (U+00A0).