How to type [ on a Swiss French keyboard
⌥ Option+5
Hold Option and press “5”.
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Try it on your keyboard: the keys you press light up.
What is the left square bracket for?
The left square bracket [ is mostly used in programming and editing:
- arrays and lists:
colors = ["red", "green"]in Python or JavaScript; - indexing:
colors[0]; - Markdown links:
[link text](https://example.com); - regular expressions:
[a-z]matches a lowercase letter; - in editing, for insertions or omissions in a quotation: “She said [that] it was fine”, [sic], or […].
It always comes with its partner, Right square bracket ].
Pitfalls
- On this layout: ⌥ Option+5. On French – Numerical: ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+(.
- Do not confuse it with the curly brace Left curly brace {, often on the same key with a different modifier.
[ on each layout
| System | Layout | Key combination |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | French – Numerical | ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+( |
| macOS | French | ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+( |
| macOS | Belgian | ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+( |
| macOS | Swiss French | ⌥ Option+5 |
| macOS | Canadian Multilingual (CSA) | ⌥ Option+9 |
| macOS | Canadian French | [ |
| macOS | Spanish | ⌥ Option+` |
| macOS | Latin American | ⇧ Shift+{ |
| macOS | U.S. | [ |
| macOS | ABC | [ |
| macOS | U.S. International – PC | [ |
Other methods
Character Viewer
Press fn + E (or Control + Command + Space) to open the Character Viewer, search for “[” by name, then double-click it to insert it.
Text replacement
In System Settings › Keyboard › Text Replacements, map a shortcut (for example “;;x”) to the character [: it will be inserted automatically in most apps.
[ technical details
| Unicode code point | U+005B |
|---|---|
| Official Unicode name | LEFT SQUARE BRACKET |
| HTML entity | [ |
| CSS | content: "\5B"; |
| JavaScript / JSON | "\u005B" |
| UTF-8 bytes | 5B |
| URL encoding | %5B |
The official name comes from the Unicode Character Database (ICU).
Related characters
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