What is a Curly Bracket? (2025)

Alternatively known as an open brace, close brace, squiggly brackets, and flower brackets, curly brackets are found on the same keys as the open bracket [ and close bracket ] on U.S. keyboards.

Where are the curly bracket keys on the keyboard?

Below is an overview of a US QWERTY computer keyboard with the open and close curly bracket keys highlighted in blue.

How to create an open and close curly bracket

Creating the "{" and "}" symbols on a U.S. keyboard

On English keyboards, the open bracket and close bracket are on the same key as [ and ] (square bracket) keys, located near Enter. To get a curly bracket, press and hold Shift, then press { or } keyboard key.

Creating the "{" and "}" symbol on a smartphone or tablet

To create a curly bracket on a smartphone or tablet, open the keyboard, go to the numbers (123) menu, then the (#+=) or symbols (sym) menu, and tap the "{" or "}" symbol.

How are curly brackets used?

Programming

Curly brackets are commonly used in programming languages such as C, Java, Perl, and PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) to enclose groups of statements or blocks of code. Below is an example of what an enclosed statement looks like in Perl.

$value = 0;
do {
 $value++;
 if ($value >= 10) {
 print "Value is greater than or equal to 10. Ending.";
 exit;
 }
} until ($value >= 100);

In the example above are two enclosed statements using curly brackets. The first group is the do loop that continues to increase the value of the $value variable up to 100. In that group is the if statement to check if $value is greater than or equal to 10. Once $value is greater than or equal to 10, it prints a message and exits.

Field codes

In word processors, like Microsoft Word, curly brackets help identify field codes.

CSS

With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), curly brackets enclose the values of a style. For example, in the following CSS code, the hyperlinks are changed to bold red text.

a { color: red; font-weight: bold;}

Regular expressions

With a regular expression, the curly brackets specify the number of occurrences of a pattern. For example, "a{3}" would look for matches of three a's (aaa). To have a more greedy match, "a{3,}" would match anything with three or more a's. Finally, if you wanted to be a little less greedy, "a{3,5}" would match three, four, or five a's.

Mathematics

With mathematics, the curly brackets represent sets (e.g., {1,2,3}) and functions (e.g., f(x)={x+1,x-1}).

What are the other symbols on the curly bracket keys?

On U.S. keyboards, { and } (curly bracket) keys are shared with [ or ] (square bracket) keys. To create the curly bracket, press and hold Shift, and press { or } keyboard key.

Bracket, Delimiter, Keyboard terms, Parenthesis, Programming terms, Punctuation, Square bracket, Typography terms