Exploring Unicode

16 Apr 2021

This script demonstrates how to display Unicode characters and symbols, including emoji, in Pine:
 • Part 1 displays multi-line labels on hi/lo pivots.
 • Part 2 displays price/volume bumps using small up/down arrows plotted with plotchar().
 • Part 3 detects bounces and uses plotshape() to mark them.
  You can use our `f_bounceFrom()` function from this part as confirmation for signals in your strategies.

Note that the labels displayed on pivots with the code in Part 1 are plotted in the past. In realtime, they would only appear where they are after 50 bars have elapsed from that point. The other plots are plotted on the bar where their conditions are detected.

You can display thousands of Unicode characters and symbols using Pine. As you can see with our script, it is very easy to do so. The challenge will often be to find the exact symbols you are looking for. Many websites exist to help you explore Unicode characters or symbols. The PineCoders Resources page contains a section presenting a few of them.

Duyck has a Unicode font function script containing functions to convert strings to monospaced Unicode representations. TradingView uses the Trebuchet font for most of its text, including text displayed with Pine scripts. While its numerals are monospace and will align vertically in labels text, Duyck's functions will be handy when you need to convert characters to a monospaced form, so they also align vertically in multi-line labels.

What is Unicode?
Unicode is to character encoding what Wikipedia is to knowledge; it holds codes to a good proportion of the characters or symbols used by humans, past or present. In the early days of computing, environments from different manufacturers often used different character encoding schemes, making transport between them difficult. Unicode solves that challenge. It is a comprehensive encoding scheme that visionaries from Xerox and Apple came up with in the late 80's. The addition of members from the Research Libraries Group, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Next and Metaphor created the "Unicode working group" and later, the Unicode Consortium, which continues to improve and manage the Unicode standard.

Theoretically, Unicode encodes values representing characters or glyphs—not their pictorial representations. The letters "A" or "a", or the blue heart emoji "💙" are each represented by a Unicode value. In practice, however, there are many different versions of the Latin alphabet in Unicode. That is how our low pivot label can display different representations of the letters "ITV". The exact rendition of Unicode symbols on a specific device is left to equipment manufacturers and typeface designers.

The current Unicode space is comprised of 17 planes of 65,536 characters each, which allows for more than one million code points. Planes are further divided into character blocks, which typically hold a character set corresponding to one script—or language. Emoticons are in the character block starting at U+1F600.



Look first. Then leap.

16 Apr 2021

Catatan Rilis

v1.1
Updated comments.

24 Jul 2022

Catatan Rilis

v2

Updated to Pine Script™ v5