Box Drawings Light Vertical

The Box Drawings Light Vertical at U+2502 is a printable line-drawing character that forms a thin vertical rule in text. It belongs to the Box Drawing block, whose characters are designed to join into rectangular frames, tables, and diagrams in monospaced layouts. Its most common use is in terminal and console interfaces, where it separates columns or forms the side of a box around menus, status panels, and file-browser panes. Command-line tools may use it in tree views, progress displays, and text user interfaces, as in a directory listing where │ marks continuation lines between nested branches. It also appears in plain-text documentation, README files, Markdown tables before conversion, and copied output from terminal programs when authors want visible structure without relying on images. In typography it is distinct from the ordinary vertical bar |: this character is meant to connect neatly with other box-drawing pieces, while the vertical bar is a punctuation and operator character used in writing, mathematics, and programming.