Where do I find the "|" key?

I'm trying to enter an "or" comparison and buggered if I know where this key is, I been getting away so far with copy/pasting it from other places, but I'm sure it's somewhere easy?

How on earth did you get that into the subject, copy/paste? (guess so, I read that and it didn't register ) On many layouts, it's a shifted \. What sort of keyboard do you have?

See the \ key? It should be to the left of the backspace key. Press shift+\ to get |.

Doh!
My 3 keyboards all show a break in the middle of the line sharing the "\" key.
I wonder if........

||||||||||||

WOOT! EUREKA! A bit of coloring in with a black pen on the key and now it works

I had to manually draw it on the screen with a pen

Oh, THAT. The little break is IBM's fault, they had a weird glyph fetish for the longest time.

I'm disturbed by that, and that's saying alot.

One of my keyboards actually has an "Any" Key on it, not sure what it does or what scan code it returns but it solves the old "Press Any Key to continue" problem.

Wish I would have had that one. Would have saved me years of frustration.

And don't feel bad Tegg, it took me awhile to figure the "|" key out myself.

This seems more like a Windows font issue than any problem with the actual symbol on the keyboard. If you type a | into DOS, a Windows command prompt session, and likely pretty much any other OS ever, you will see a character that has a break in the middle. (Yes, I am probably taking this response too seriously. )

The reason why the "pipe" character, as it is called, is broken on many keyboards is because it looks like a capital "I", and whoever designed said keyboards originally set the standard to put that break in there to avoid confusing users.

ASCII has a solid vertical bar since ancient times. IBM's EBCDIC had a broken bar. They deviated from tradition and used ASCII for the PC, but insisted on bringing their bar with them, never mind that EBCDIC had both by then. At least they left the lozenge behind.

It's more properly called the "vertical bar". In UNIX shells (command line languages), it's used to create a "pipe" (streaming the output of one command into the input of another) and thus is called the "pipe character" by many nerds. But the vertical bar character preceded UNIX. DOS adopted this convention as well, while saddling us with the awkward backslashes for directories. Laywers probably made them do that.

The ASCII vertical bar has been rendered as either solid or broken, depending on the terminal hardware or font, as long as I can remember (dating back to the 70's -- I can remember farther back, but was not using computers at the time!) There was no serious standardization. However, IBM keyboards and terminals tended to show it as a broken bar, and our Windows PC keyboards derive from that.

Now there is a Unicode character representing the broken bar, but that generally doesn't appear when you use the key that shows a broken vertical bar on your keyboard: instead you get the ASCII vertical bar key that might be broken or not, depending on the font that you use, but usually it's solid.

British keyboards reportedly have both keys, solid and broken vertical bars.

Go figure.

Probably requires a quadruple bucky to get at it.

They do indeed. Here's a few I did ealier. |¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|¦|

The key to the left of the '1' has three characters on it...
Unmodified: `
Shifted: ¬
Alt Gr (I kid you not): ¦

AltGr proudly brought to you by IBM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key

interesting, I have an Alt Gr key but it works just like the Alt key. What code Page do you have loaded Pale?

Um... 850?

But is it a code-page thing, or a keyboard thing?

Some links for all of those with a keyboard fetish...




...the Chinese keyboards look the most fun!