Bracket

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What Does Bracket Mean?

Brackets, or braces, are a syntactic construct in many programming languages. They take the forms of “[]”, “()”, “{}” or “<>.” They are typically used to denote programming language constructs such as blocks, function calls or array subscripts.

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Brackets are also known as braces.

Techopedia Explains Bracket

Brackets are an important syntactic element in most major programming languages. They may take several forms. The most common are the “{}”, “[]”, ()” and “<>” brackets. There are several other names for these characters. The “{}” are referred to as curly brackets or braces while “<>” are often called angle brackets or braces. The term “curly braces” is more favored in the U.S., while “brackets” is more widely used in British English. The “()” are also frequently abbreviated as “parens” since they are parantheses characters. These characters are encoded in both ASCII and Unicode.

These brackets define important constructs in a programming language. For example, in C and languages influenced by C, “{}” denote a code block while “[]” refers to an array subscript. In Perl, the “<>” is referred to as the filehandle operator for reading from and writing to files.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.