Caret

Not to be confused with Carrot or Carat.

This article is about the spacing character that resembles a chevron. For use as a diacritic or "hat" modifying another character (as in â), see Circumflex. For the math function, see Exponentiation. For other uses of the word "caret", see Caret (disambiguation).

‸ ⁁ ⎀
Caret
In Unicode	U+2038 ‸ CARET (HTML ‸) U+2041 ⁁ CARET INSERTION POINT U+2380 ⎀ INSERTION SYMBOL
Different from
Different from	U+005E ^ CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT U+028C ʌ LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED V U+2227 ∧ LOGICAL AND

The caret /ˈkærɪt/ is an inverted V-shaped grapheme, sometimes extended, used in proofreading and typography to indicate that material needs to be inserted at this point in the text. It has a variety of functional uses in programming and other contexts.

The keyboard symbol ^ has two meanings: used stand-alone it is a caret, used as a combining diacritic (as in ŵ) it is a circumflex accent.

The caret is not to be confused with other chevron-shaped characters, such as the circumflex accent, the turned v or the logical AND, which may occasionally be called carets.

Uses

Proofreading mark

The caret was originally and continues to be used in handwritten form as a proofreading mark to indicate where a punctuation mark, word, or phrase should be inserted into a document. The term comes from the Latin caret, "it lacks", from carēre, "to lack; to be separated from; to be free from". The caret symbol is written below the line of text for a line-level punctuation mark, such as a comma, or above the line as an inverted caret (cf. U+02C7 ˇ CARON) for a higher character, such as an apostrophe; the material to be inserted may be placed inside the caret, in the margin, or above the line.

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  Carets telling reader to insert a comma, an apostrophe, and quotation marks

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  Caret telling a reader to insert a letter

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  Caret telling reader to insert a word

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  Caret telling reader to change a word

Programming languages

The caret has many uses in programming languages. It can signify exponentiation, the bitwise XOR operator, string concatenation, and control characters in caret notation, among other uses. In regular expressions, the caret is used to match the beginning of a string or line; if it begins a character class, then the inverse of the class is to be matched.

ANSI C can transcribe the caret in the form of the trigraph ??', as the character was originally not available in all character sets and keyboards. C++ additionally supports tokens like xor (for ^) and xor_eq (for ^=) to avoid the character altogether. RFC 1345 recommends to transcribe the character as digraph '> when required.

Pascal uses the caret for declaring and dereferencing pointers. In Smalltalk, the caret is the method return statement. In C++/CLI, .NET reference types are accessed through a handle using the ClassName^ syntax. In Apple's C extensions for Mac OS X and iOS, carets are used to create blocks and to denote block types. Go uses it as a bitwise NOT operator.

Node.js uses the caret in package.json files to signify dependency resolution behavior being used for each particular dependency. In the case of Node.js, a caret allows any kind of update, unless it is seen as a "major" update as defined by semver.

Surrogate symbol for superscript and exponentiation

In mathematics, the caret can signify exponentiation (3^5 for 3⁵), where the usual superscript is not readily usable (as on some graphing calculators). The caret is also now used to indicate a superscript in TeX typesetting. As Isaac Asimov described it in his 1974 "Skewered!" essay (on Skewes' number), "I make the exponent a figure of normal size and it is as though it is being held up by a lever, and its added weight when its size grows bends the lever down." The use of the caret for exponentiation can be traced back to ALGOL 60, which expressed the exponentiation operator as an upward-pointing arrow, intended to evoke the superscript notation common in mathematics. The upward-pointing arrow is now used as a form of iterated exponentiation in Knuth's up-arrow notation.

Escape character

The command-line interpreter, cmd.exe, of Windows family of operating systems uses the caret (^) to escape reserved characters.

Example

C:\>ECHO Show greater than: ^> pipe: ^| less than: ^< caret: ^^ and  ^%TMP^% and ^&
Show greater than: > pipe: | less than: < caret: ^ and  %TMP% and &

Ordinal indicator

In Italian, the caret is sometimes used in a similar manner to the ordinal indicator, most noticeably on tickets from Trenitalia, the primary operator of trains within Italy, and Rome's ATAC public transit system. On Trenitalia tickets, the travel class is often written as 1^ or 2^, meaning first class or second class respectively. This is due to the lack of the feminine ordinal indicator (^−a) used in Italian in the ASCII set (the masculine ordinal indicator is usually replaced by the degree sign when extended characters are not available or in less accurate typesetting).

Signature tag

In social network services such as Twitter, a caret placed before a word is used to tag that word as an individual's signature within a group account thus differentiating an individual's contribution from a group-authored contribution.

Upwards-pointing arrow

In internet forums, social networking sites such as Facebook, or in online chats, a caret or a series of carets may be used beneath or after the post of one user by another user. In this usage, the caret ^ represents an upwards-pointing arrow meaning for readers, posters or the original post (OP) to see the above line/post, and in addition to the arrow usage, can also mean that the user who posted the ^ agrees with the above post. Multiple carets may indicate the comment is replying to or relating to the post above that correlates with the number of carets used, or may simply be used for emphasis.

A similar use has been adopted by programming language compilers such as Java compiler to point out where a compilation error has occurred. In addition to indicating the line number and column number of the error location, the compiler prints out the faulty line of code and uses a single caret on the next line, padded by spaces, to give a visual indication of the error location. The caret acts as an upwards-pointing arrow in the text-based print out of the error details.

Estimator

In statistics or other forms of estimation, estimators of a parameter or dependent variable can be shown by use of a caret or hat symbol above the symbol for that parameter or dependent variable. For example, with observations of independent variable data $x_{i}$ and dependent variable data $y_{i}$, and assuming a model of $y_{i}=\beta _{0}+\beta _{1}x_{i}+\varepsilon _{i}$, simple linear regression can lead to an estimated model of the form ${\hat {y}}_{i}={\hat {\beta }}_{0}+{\hat {\beta }}_{1}x_{i}$ where $\sum _{i}(y_{i}-{\hat {y}}_{i})^{2}$ is minimised by finding optimal values of ${\hat {\beta }}_{0}$ and ${\hat {\beta }}_{1}$ for the observed data.

Historic computer systems encoding

The original 1963 version of the ASCII standard reserved the code point 5E_hex for an up-arrow (↑). However, the 1965 ECMA-6 standard replaced the up-arrow with circumflex (^) diacritic and two years later, the second revision of ASCII followed suit. As the early mainframes and minicomputers largely used teleprinters as output devices, it was possible to print the circumflex above a letter when needed. With the proliferation of monitors, however, this was seen insufficient, and precomposed characters, with the diacritic included, were instead introduced into appended character sets, such as Latin-1 and subsequently Unicode. The original circumflex character was left for other purposes, and as it did not need to fit above a letter anymore, it became larger in appearance.