It took me a few passes to realize you were not just being comically excited and typing in all caps, but rather, everything you typed is rather pedantically and accurately capitalized.

I just copied the DuckDuckGo Unicode Instant Answer (https://duck.co/ia/view/unicode) ;)

On Windows ALT+248 (on keypad) makes a degree symbol: °

IMO it looks better than the single glyph. (°C °F vs ℃ ℉)

Unicode agrees:

> Several letterlike symbols are used to indicate units. In most cases, however, such as for SI units (Système International), the use of regular letters or other symbols is preferred.

> In normal use, it is better to represent degrees Celsius “°C” with a sequence of U+00B0 degree sign + U+0043 latin capital letter c, rather than U+2103 degree celsius. For searching, treat these two sequences as identical. Similarly, the sequence U+00B0 degree sign + U+0046 latin capital letter f is preferred over U+2109 degree fahrenheit, and those two sequences should be treated as identical for searching.

(From https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ch22.pdf)

The why include the symbols in the first place? Just in case?

It's most likely for round-trip compatibility with another encoding. There are many Unicode codepoints that simply represent combinations of other codepoints. If you don't care about round-tripping, just normalize everything to NFKC or NFKD (the difference being that accented letters like á are one codepoint in NFKC and two codepoints for the base letter and combining mark in NFKD).

For lossless round-tripping with legacy character sets. This is one explicit design goal of Unicode.

So we can make search that tiny bit more complicated.

Does that not appear correctly on your device? Which would that be?

No, it does (a bit squashed, but it's perfectly readable). I didn't know there was as specific Unicode character for those.

As a rule you can just assume there is, no matter the situation.

if you're on a Mac, you can use alt-0 for a degrees symbol too

That's actually U+00BA MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR. You want U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, which is ⌥⇧8.

Upvoted as one of the most HN comments I’ve ever seen.

I’m generally amused that a top thread for an N95 sterilization post is a Unicode discussion.

What’s the feminine ordinal indicator. I thought it was a degree sign because as a Portuguese speaker I’ve never noticed the feminine ordinal indicator as an easily accessible option. Are both easily accessible on the iOS keyboard?

U+00AA FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR is ª, accessible via ⌥9 on macOS.

I just realized I have used the ordinal symbol many times when I should have used the degree sign. Why didn't someone tell me? Oh, I've been making an idiot out of myself.

That depends on the keyboard layout. On the Norwegian keyboard for example, ⌥⇧Q produces the degree symbol, whereas ⌥⇧8 produces U+007B LEFT CURLY BRACKET.

You totally blew my mind—I've been using the wrong one for years. Henceforth, ⌥⇧8. Thank you.