Caret

1. Another name for a cursor. 2. Alternatively referred to as the circumflex, the caret is the symbol ( ^ ) above the 6 key on a standard United States qwerty keyboard. In mathematics, the caret represents an exponent, square, cube, or other power. For example, 6^3, which may also be represented as 6³ or 6 * 6 * 6.

3. Carets are also used in computer programming languages for various reasons. For example, in Perl, a user may use the below regular expression to replace the first character in the variable "myvariable" with an uppercase character. Many programs that support regular expressions (Regex) will use ^ to match the first character in a line or string.

$myvariable =~ s/^(\w)/\U$1/g;

In C-style programming languages, the caret is used for a bitwise XOR.

4. Many times documentation or information from Computer Hope and other computer related documentation may list commands such as ^X, ^C, ^Z, etc. this means CTRL-X, CTRL-C, CTRL-Z, etc. In other words, a user would want to press and hold the CONTROL or CTRL key and then press the letter following the caret.

5. In chat, someone may type a series of carets, e.g. (^^^^^^^), which is an indication to read the above line.

• Computer keyboard keys and explanations.

Also see: Cursor, Keyboard definitions