Russia put it to a vote. The Bank of Russia opened public balloting on its own website for a month from 5 November 2013, and the winning design — a Cyrillic capital Р with an extra horizontal line across the leg — took more than 61 per cent. The bank approved it on 11 December.
What followed was quick by the standards of character encoding. The Russian national standards body filed a proposal on 21 January 2014, six weeks after approval, and the sign shipped in Unicode 7.0 that June. Six months from a central bank announcement to a slot in the universal character set is close to the practical floor; adding a character normally means proposal, committee review, and a wait for the next annual release, and plenty of currency symbols have taken years.
One detail is worth getting right, because it is frequently garbled: there is one crossbar, not two. The bank's own wording specifies a capital Р "with an extra horizontal line," singular, and the glyph bears that out — anyone drawing it with a double stroke is confusing it with something else.
Unicode's annotation, meanwhile, is a small masterpiece of restraint. The entire note attached to the character reads: "Russia."
About Ruble Sign
Ruble Sign is the Unicode character ₽ at codepoint U+20BD in the Currency Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Ruble Sign
To use the Ruble Sign symbol (₽) in HTML, insert the
entity ₽ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ₽ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\20BD';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u20BD' evaluates to ₽. In Python source, write '\u20BD'.
The character encodes to E2 82 BD as UTF-8 bytes and 20BD as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8381.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.