The Pipe Character ‘|’ on Windows Phone 7

Recently I decided to put a bit of Powershell in a reply to a tweet. I was using my fancy shmancy new Windows Phone 7. Well, needless to say I ran into a few problems when I tried to insert the pipe character. I suppose it isn’t too commonly used, but I really wanted it to get my message across (whilst I could have probably used a capital I to get my point across, some fonts won’t do that and it wouldn’t be able to be pasted, so that wouldn’t do).

After holding down what felt like every button¹ to see what special characters they revealed (like the iPhone, the ° symbol is hidden under the ’0′ key) the pipe character still eluded me. However Windows Phone 7 also comes with a special smiley keyboard which has a wide array of smileys to choose from, including the flat :| smiley. Knowing that was the pipe character right there it became easy, simply insert the :| smiley, move the cursor between the colon and the pipe, hit the backspace key and move the cursor back to the end of the line.

It couldn’t be simpler…

Actually, maybe it could. Pipe symbol please!?!

On the English (UK) keyboard[back ↩]

http://teknologika.com/ Bruce McLeod

or an iPhone …

http://www.i-think22.net/ Rhys Parry

Actually, it would probably take longer on my iPhone thanks to iOS 4.

http://buffered.io/ OJ

Now that you have Disqus commenting is a joy nnI haven’t yet had the need to use the pipe on my WP7, obviously a good thing based on what you’re saying. It’s a bit crap that they don’t have a FULL keyboard.nnStill, it’s way better than the iPhone experience I was “used to”. At least my phone responds to keypresses now. I’ll take a responsive phone with a missing pipe over a phone with a full keyboard that takes a decade to respond.
http://buffered.io/ OJ

I read that as “or a Pineapple”.
http://buffered.io/ OJ

One thing that I forgot to mention is that the pipe key isn’t actually missing, it’s just a PITA to get to.

http://www.i-think22.net/ Rhys Parry

So where is it hiding?

http://buffered.io/ OJ

Press the “&123″ button, then on the next keypad press the “–>” button. It’s on the far right after that, second-bottom line next to the backspace.

http://www.i-think22.net/ Rhys Parry

So it is. Well actually I can live with that. For some reason I filtered that button out of the equation even though it was exactly what I was looking for.