ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Box-drawing characters

Box-drawing characters are special symbols that we can use to draw lines and boxes on a computer. It's like having a box of LEGO pieces, but instead of using actual LEGO, we use these special symbols to build all sorts of shapes.

Imagine you have a sheet of paper and you want to draw a simple square box. You start by drawing a horizontal line at the top of the paper. This line goes from the left side of the paper to the right side. Then, you draw a vertical line going from the top to the bottom, starting at the left side. Next, you draw another horizontal line at the bottom, parallel to the first one. Finally, you draw a vertical line from the bottom to the top, starting at the right side. Now you have a square box!

In computers, we have special symbols called box-drawing characters that can do the same thing. These symbols look like little lines and corners, and we can use them to draw boxes and lines just like we did on paper.

There are different box-drawing characters that represent different types of lines and corners. For example, there is a character that looks like a horizontal line, another that looks like a vertical line, and others that look like corners with different angles. By combining these characters in different ways, we can create all sorts of shapes and boxes.

To use these box-drawing characters, we need to tell the computer where we want to put them and how to arrange them. We do this by writing special codes in the computer's language, which is like giving the computer a set of instructions.

For example, let's say we want to draw a simple box using box-drawing characters. We would write a code like this:

╔════╗
║ ║
║ ║
╚════╝

In this code, the character "╔" represents the top left corner of the box, "════" represents the top line, "╗" represents the top right corner, "║" represents the vertical lines, and so on. When the computer reads this code, it knows that we want to draw a box and it uses the box-drawing characters to create it on the screen.

So, box-drawing characters are like special symbols that we can use to draw lines and boxes on computers. They help us create different shapes and structures by combining these symbols together. It's like having a set of LEGO pieces specifically for drawing on a computer.