13/02/2024, 21:33 Caret - Wikipedia

Care
Care is the name sed familiarl for the character ^ (the

^
circ mfle and a circ mfle accent) pro ided on most QWERTY
ke boards b t ping S f + 6 . The s mbol has a ariet of ses
in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from
its is al similarit to the original proofreader's caret, a mark
sed in proofreading to indicate here a p nct ation mark, ord,
or phrase sho ld be inserted into a doc ment. The formal ASCII Care
standard (X3.64.1977) calls it a "circ mfle ". 1 I U c de U+005E ^ CI C MFLE
ACCEN (&H ;)
His or D ffe e f
D ffe e U+2038 CA E
f U+02C6 ˆ MODIFIE
T pe riters
LE E CI C MFLE

ACCEN
On t pe riters designed for lang ages that ro tinel se diacritics
(accent marks), there are t o possible a s to t pe these: ke s U+028C ʌ LA IN MALL

can be dedicated to precomposed characters ( ith the diacritic LE E NED

incl ded); alternati el a dead ke mechanism can be pro ided. U+2227 ∧ LOGICAL AND
With the latter, a mark is made hen a dead ke is t ped b t, U+039B Λ G EEK
nlike normal ke s, the paper carriage does not mo e on and th s CAPI AL LE E LAMDA
the ne t letter to be t ped is printed nder the accent. The ^
s mbol as originall pro ided in t pe riters and comp ter
printers so that circ mfle accents co ld be o erprinted on letters
(as in or ).

Transposition into ISO/IEC 646 and ASCII

The incorporation of the circ mfle s mbol into ASCII is a

conseq ence of this prior e istence on t pe riters: this s mbol did T e e F e c (AZERTY)
not e ist independentl as a t pe or hot-lead printing character. e b a d: à , è , é , ç a e
The original 1963 ersion of the ASCII standard sed the code ded ca ed e ; e c c e a d
point 5E for an p-arro ↑ . Ho e er, the 1965 ISO/IEC 646 d ae e acce a e dead e
standard defined code point 5E as one of fi e a ailable for
national ariation, ith the circ mfle ^ diacritic as the defa lt
and the p-arro as one of the alternati e ses. 2 In 1967, the second re ision of ASCII follo ed
s it. 3

O erprinting to add an accent mark as not al a s s pported ell b printers, and as almost ne er
possible on ideo terminals. Instead, precomposed characters ere e ent all created to sho the
accented letters. The freestanding circ mfle ( hich had come to be called a caret) q ickl became

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13/02/2024, 21:33 Caret - Wikipedia

re sed for man other p rposes, s ch as in comp ter lang ages and
mathematical notation. As the mark did not need to fit abo e a letter an
more, it became larger in appearance s ch that it can no longer be sed to
o erprint an accent. 4
^â
Ca e c a ed
In Unicode, it is encoded as +005E ^ CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT; in HTML, it ma e -ca e c c e
be inserted ith &H ;. acce

This caret is not to be conf sed ith other che ron-shaped characters, s ch
as the t rned or the logical AND, hich ma occasionall be called carets. 5 6

Uses

Programming languages

The s mbol ^ has man ses in programming lang ages, here it is t picall called a caret. It can
signif e ponentiation, the bit ise XOR operator, string concatenation, and control characters in
caret notation, among other ses. In reg lar e pressions, the caret is sed to match the beginning of a
string or line; if it begins a character class, then the in erse of the class is to be matched.

ANSI C can transcribe the caret in the form of the trigraph ??', as the character as originall not
a ailable in all character sets and ke boards. C++ additionall s pports tokens like (for ) and
(for =) to a oid the character altogether. RFC 1345 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rf
c1345) recommends that the character be transcribed as digraph '> hen req ired. 7

Pascal ses the caret for declaring and dereferencing pointers. In Smalltalk, the caret is the method
ret rn statement. In C++/CLI, .NET reference t pes are accessed thro gh a handle sing the
C N s nta . In Apple's C e tensions for Mac OS X and iOS, carets are sed to create blocks
and to denote block t pes. Go ses it as a bit ise NOT operator.

Node.js ses the caret in package.json files to signif dependenc resol tion beha ior being sed for
each partic lar dependenc . In the case of Node.js, a caret allo s an kind of pdate, nless it is seen
as a "major" pdate as defined b sem er.

Surrogate s mbol for superscript and e ponentiation

In mathematics, the caret can signif e ponentiation (e.g. 3 5 for 35) here the s al s perscript is
not readil sable (as on some graphing calc lators). It is also sed to indicate a s perscript in TeX
t pesetting. As Isaac Asimo described it in his 1974 "S e e ed!" essa (on Ske es's n mber), "I
make the e ponent a fig re of normal si e and it is as tho gh it is being held p b a le er, and its
added eight hen its si e gro s bends the le er do n."

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The se of the caret for e ponentiation can be traced back to ALGOL 60, hich e pressed the
e ponentiation operator as an p ard-pointing arro , intended to e oke the s perscript notation
common in mathematics. The p ard-pointing arro is no sed to signif h peroperations in
Kn th's p-arro notation.

Escape character

It is often seen in caret notation to sho control characters: for instance, A means the control
character ith al e 1.

The Windo s command-line interpreter (cmd.e e) ses the caret to escape reser ed characters (most
other shells se the backslash). For e ample, to pass a 'less-than' sign as an arg ment to a program,
one o ld t pe <.

Up ard-pointing arro

In internet for ms, on social net orking sites s ch as Facebook, or in online chats, one or more carets
ma be sed beneath the te t of another post, representing an p ard-pointing arro to that post; 10
in addition to the arro sage, it can also mean that the ser ho posted the ^ agrees ith the abo e
post. M ltiple carets ma be sed to indicate that the comment is repl ing to, or relating to, the post
abo e that correlates ith the n mber of carets sed, or to " nderscore" the correct portion of the
pre io s post, or simpl for emphasis.

A similar se has been adopted b programming lang age compilers, s ch as the Ja a compiler, to
point o t here a compilation error has occ rred. The compiler prints o t the fa lt line of code and
ses a single caret on the ne t line, padded b spaces, to gi e a is al indication of the error location.

See also
Caret as used in proofreading and t pograph
Hat operator, a notation used in mathematics and statistics, is sometimes called a caret

No es
a. ISO 646 (and ASCII, which it includes) is a standard for 7-bit encoding, providing just 96 printable
characters (and 32 control characters). This was insuf cient to meet the needs of Western
European languages and so the standard speci es certain code points that are available for
national variation.
b. For instance in ISO Latin-1.
c. Its actual shape, positioning and relative dimensions var b font.

References
1. "American National Standard for Information Interchange" (https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legac
/FIPS/ pspub1-2-1977.pdf) (PDF). National Institute for Standards. 1977. (facsimile, not machine
readable)

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13/02/2024, 21:33 Caret - Wikipedia

2. "Character histories: notes on some ASCII code positions (5E)" (https://jkorpela. /latin1/ascii-hist.h
tml#5E).
3. Tom Jennings. "ASCII: American Standard Code for Information In ltration" (https://web.archive.or
g/web/20140821121342/http://www.worldpowers stems.com/projects/codes/index.html#UP).
Archived from the original (http://www.worldpowers stems.com/projects/codes/index.html#UP) on
21 August 2014. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
4. Jukka K. Korpela (18 Januar 2010). "Kirjainten tarinoita" (https://jkorpela. /kirjaimet/tarinoita.pdf)
(PDF) (in Finnish). pp. 132 133. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
5. Unicode (1991 2012). "IPA Extensions" (http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf) (PDF).
Retrieved 20 August 2012.
6. Eric W. Weisstein. "Caret" (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Caret.html). Ma hWorld. Wolfram.
Retrieved 20 August 2012.
7. Simonsen, Keld (June 1992). "RFC 1345 Character Mnemonics and Character Sets" (http://tool
s.ietf.org/html/rfc1345). Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 7 March 2022.
8. "Caret ranges in node.js" (https://web.archive.org/web/20161203095427/https://docs.npmjs.com/m
isc/semver#caret-ranges-123-025-004). Archived from the original (https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/s
emver#caret-ranges-123-025-004) on 3 December 2016. Retrieved 1 October 2019.
9. Isaac Asimov (1974), "Skewered", Of Ma er Grea and Small, Doubleda , ISBN 978-0385022255
10. "What is Caret?" (http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/c/caret.htm). Computer Hope. Retrieved
14 August 2012.

Re e ed f " ://e . ed a. / / de . ? e=Ca e & d d=1189890192"

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