Is there a Pac-Man-like character in ASCII or Unicode?

Simple question: is there a character that looks either like Pac-Man, or like the ghost in Pac-Man?

With Google's recent Pac-Man logo, everyone should know what these look like, but in case you don't here are some sample images:

If you answer "no" please provide a little more proof that you actually searched all unicode characters...

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Example of what I'm looking for: If I were to ask, "is there a character that looks like a sun", I would expect an answer along the lines of "Yes, ☼ and according to charmap it is U+263C". That's what I'm looking for, but with Pac-Man or the ghost...

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Usage: I would like to paste this symbol into a web form textbox in order for it to show on a webpage. This is a one-line textbox, so a complex ASCII art "image" isn't acceptable in this case.

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12 Answers

ᗤ <- pacman, also a ghost ᗣ got here by google, someone else will be looking for it, don't remember the unicode for it but i copied the characters from a old file.

6

I know it's not quite what you asked, but Pacman makes an appearance in the discotastic DF Strand Midnight typeface.

It's not looking good -- presumably, anything resembling Pac-Man would be in the "Geometric Shapes" block, but the closest you'll get is a circle that's 1/4 filled:

◔
◕
◴ ◵ ◶ ◷

2

For finding unicode symbols that look like things, I use the shapecatcher.com website. It allows you to draw an example and then does an image search. Though you may need to use a few tries to find what you're looking for. This is surprisingly handy to use, for example I've used it to look for unicode characters that look like application icons.

If I draw a crude left-facing Pacman outline, about half-way through the results I get the

Canadian syllabics carrier tte: ᗤ

as found in the top answer.

This is the most similar I could find:

ᗧ

No. Unicode does not provide amusing characters just for the fun of it--all of the wacky characters in Unicode (like the snowman and the sun) are there because some legacy encoding included them.

No legacy character set ever had a Pac-Man character. Hence, Pac-Man is not in Unicode.

If you're trying to find out if there's some oddball character that kinda-sorta resembles Pac-Man, you'll have to look through all of the codepages yourself.

5

No.

If you answer "no" please provide a little more proof that you actually searched all unicode characters...

Did you search all the unicode characters?

2

( *< • • •

^ closest I can get to making Pacman with text

ଓ

I think this looks like Pac-Man!

The list of characters slated for Unicode 6.0 includes U+1F47B GHOST.

3

I know CSS3 is kind'a cheating but could not resist rotating 45deg.. and adding animation to make pack-man "chew"..

it's also content-dynamic, since you can place any two symbos in state-a and state-b

:) ☕

On 1/25/2022 Pacman glyph in all (four) directions got accepted to Unicode as part of the 731 legacy computing symbols proposed in L2/21-235 in a new block named "Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement" for a future version of the Unicode standard.

See pages 22 and 26 in above linked proposal; under "Game Sprites" symbols 1CC6B to 1CC6E.

This was announced by The Unicode Consortium on Twitter