Indian rupee sign (U+20B9) in HTML
The Indian rupee sign was adopted in 2010 and encoded at U+20B9. It has no named HTML entity, so it must be written as a numeric reference or typed directly.
At a glance
- Character
- ₹
- Named entity
- None. Use the numeric references.
- Decimal reference
- ₹
- Hex reference
- ₹
- Unicode code point
- U+20B9
- Unicode name
- INDIAN RUPEE SIGN
- In the entity reference
- Currency
In detail
The symbol was selected in a public competition and adopted in 2010, then encoded in Unicode shortly afterwards. Because the named entity list in HTML was fixed long before that, there is no name for it and there never will be. Numeric references are the correct and only form, which is exactly why it appears in the entity reference tool with its hex reference in the name column.
It is a different character from the generic rupee sign at U+20A8, which is the older symbol used for rupee currencies across South Asia and which looks like the letters R and s joined. Content written before 2010, and content covering Pakistani, Sri Lankan or Nepalese rupees, may legitimately use the older symbol or the plain abbreviation Rs.
Indian number formatting does not group in threes. After the first three digits the grouping switches to twos, so ten million is written as one crore with the separators falling in different places from a Western grouping. Rendering a rupee amount with three digit groups is a stronger signal that the page was not localised than getting the symbol wrong.
Font coverage was genuinely a problem for the first few years after adoption and is now good on current systems, but it is still worth checking on any older device in your support matrix. Where a fallback is needed, INR or Rs. is the conventional substitute rather than a lookalike character.
Examples
new Intl.NumberFormat("en-IN", { style: "currency", currency: "INR" }).format(12500000);
// groups as 1,25,00,000 rather than 12,500,000<p>₹499 per year</p>
<p>₹499 per year</p>
<p>&rupee;499 renders as five literal characters, because that name does not exist.</p>Things that catch people out
- Grouping rupee amounts in threes is the most common localisation mistake on Indian pricing pages, and it is more noticeable to a local reader than a missing symbol.
- The generic rupee sign at U+20A8 is a different character. Substituting it changes which currency the page appears to be quoting.
- There is no named entity. Any snippet showing one is wrong and will render as literal text.
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