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This character has no named entity, so the numeric form is the one to use.

\2196

For a content property in a ::before or ::after rule. No semicolon, and mind the trailing space.

\u2196

Valid in a JavaScript or JSON string literal, so it survives files and pipelines that are not UTF-8 clean.

\u2196

The escape for a Python string literal.

%E2%86%96

Percent-encoded UTF-8, for a query string or a path segment.

E2 86 96

3 bytes on the wire. Seeing these as separate garbled characters means something decoded them as single-byte text.