Is there a "n/a" symbol in unicode?

Question

Is there an unicode symbol for "n/a"? There are some fractions like ½, but a n/a symbol seems to be missing.

If there is none, what would be the most appropriate unicode symbol to use for n/a in a website (which should be contained in common fonts, to avoid needing a webfont)?

Solution 1

Looking at the Unicode code charts, I do not see a single N/A symbol. I do, however, see ⁿ (U+207F) and ₐ (U+2090), which you could separate with / (U+002F) eg: ⁿ/ₐ, or ̷ (U+0337), eg: ⁿ̷ₐ, or ̸ (U+0338), eg: ⁿ̸ₐ. Probably not what you are hoping for, though. And I don't know if "common" fonts implement them, either.

Solution 2

For future reference, the fastest way I know to answer questions like the OP's when I have them myself is to go to unicodelookup.com, because of the way it works: there's a search bar at the top, and you just type a string and it will return any and all unicode characters containing that string (this is also a great way to discover new and useful symbols). So in the OP's case, he could proceed like this:

• first try entering "not" (without the quotes) in the search field
• visually scan through the results... doing so would not reveal a "not applicable" character in this case
• try again but this time entering "applic" in the search field
• again, doing so would not turn up anything along the lines of what he's looking for

At that point he would be reasonably confident the current Unicode standard does not have a "n/a" symbol.

If you use Firefox you can define a keyword like "uni" to search that site from the URL bar, meaning any time the browser is open and regardless of what page or site is currently showing, you could do this:

• hit [F6]... this moves the cursor to the URL bar at the top
• type something like "uni applic" and hit [Enter]... this brings up the unicodelookup.com website with the search results for "applic" already showing

For the above to work you would need to define your keyword ("uni" or wtv you prefer) to point to location http://unicodelookup.com/#%s.

Solution 3

There's a Negative Acknowlege icon...

␕ symbol for negative acknowledge 022025 9237 0x2415 ␕

Found by searching negative on the Unicode Lookup site.

I'm not a fan, and for my purposes have just gone with __N/A__ (Markdown..)

Solution 4

I see lots of answers going head-on at the "Not Applicable" abbreviation, without exploring what a symbol is. A quick search for the equivalent phrase "out of scope" brings up a couple of variations on the No symbol: ⃠ – this seems to fit the bill (and since I was looking for a way to represent inapplicability, I'll be using it in my technical document).

Per the Wikipedia article, the Unicode codepoint U+20E0 is a combining character, so it is superimposed on the preceding character; e.g. ! ⃠ overlays an exclamation point. To get it to appear isolated, use a non-breaking space  

If you don't want to bother with the combining symbol, the article mentions there's also an emoji U+1F6AB 🚫 but it's typically going to be colored red, or won't render!

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Comments

[allo]

I hoped for a symbol with a nice glyph, combining is not optimal. I guess there is some way to combine three chars to one symbol, but thats not really what i am looking for. And its really hard to google for unicode and "n/a" / "not available"

[Remy Lebeau]

The codepoints that I showed cannot be combined into a single symbol/glyph. Only certain codepoints, like diacritics, are designed to be combined. That is why they are called "Combining characters"

[allo]

I was searching a single glyph without combining, but i did not find one up to now, so i used an nice x symbol instead. Not ideal, but ⁿ/ₐ does not look very good, at least in my firefox.

[allo]

Good to know. I would have searched for not available, which seems to have no results as well. My current solution is to use one of the X for the reset option. fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2717/index.htm

[emlai]

U+0337 and U+0338 are not meant for that. Your answer looks like this on my PC.

[kayleeFrye_onDeck]

If you're trying to use these values in GitHub markdown, you need to change two things; 1) Remove (, U+, ) and pre-pend with &# and append with ; -- 2) Convert values from hex to dec; eg (U+2090) becomes ₐ

[Remy Lebeau]

No, I wasn't trying to use any markup for the (U+XXXX) portions. I intentionally showed the codepoint values like that, in case the coding markup that I did use didn't display the characters correctly in all browsers.

[allo]

Nice find, but I do not think it resembles n/a in a way that people would recognize. As I was looking for a functional icon it needs to be easy to recognize as n/a.

[waldyrious]

Yeah, I agree. I added it here mostly for completeness, to be honest. Sorry if I raised your hopes needlessly. 😅

[Rich]

FWIW, the emoji renders backwards, and not universally red in Segoe UI font.

[Synetech]

I'm surprised there aren't codepoints for elements; there could have been one for Sodium. 😕

[David J.]

Semantics matter. In my view, repurposing a character because it looks similar is not a good enough reason.

[David J.]

In my view, repurposing a character only because it looks similar is not enough. Semantics matter as well.