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Chuck Evans: Microsoft adCenter/Bing PPC Expert

HTML Character Entities

This table displays special (or non-standard) characters in four different ways: using the HTML Character Entity code (eg, &), the ASCII character number code (eg, &), the Unicode character number code (eg, &), and lastly, my favorite way, by not using an "entity" at all, but just by using the keyboard to insert the actual character. This is done by holding down the ALT key and typing the ASCII number on the number pad (that's important), then releasing the ALT key (eg, press ALT, type 0038, then release ALT).

Note that when creating HTML-based emails, many programs (Outlook included) won't recognize ALT+NUM characters, so you better use either the HTML entity or one of the character number codes. Also, when it comes to Unicode characters way above the ASCII limit, you can't paste them directly into HTML docs and expect them to work either, so use either the HTML entity or the Unicode code.

While browsers have gotten more and more reliable when it comes to cross-browser standards, there still are a lot of Netscape 4.x browsers out there, which makes this table still needed.

The best way to use this table is to launch whichever browser you want to test, then load up this page and take a look to see what displays and what doesn't.

Acknowledgements

The original version of this table was created by editing and adding to a table I found at HTML Character Entities. Since then, however, this table has gone through many iterations, and I even tried creating an XML-based version, figuring that XML would be the perfect way to hold all the different codes and entities needed. Well, that didn't work out, mainly because XML won't support non-standard HTML entities, and when I tried to get the non-standard entities to build themselves in the XSL stylesheet instead, that didn't work either. The result of all that experimentation was, however, that I recreated the underlying HTML table code from scratch.

To get the correct Unicode hex values, I used the Windows Character Map utility.

This table is not complete (though it is much more complete than it used to be). To save time, I concentrated on the symbols and characters I use most often in my own pages. In particular, I left out the Greek characters. You can get the entity codes for those at the HTML Character Entities site listed above.

Copyright © 2010 Chuck Evans. All Rights Reserved.