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 button ((On the English (UK) keyboard)) 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!?!