HTML special characters codes

• Overview
• General symbols
• Accented / Latin language diacritical characters
• Greek characters
• Mathematical symbols and operators
• Alterative ways to insert symbols

Overview - HTML special characters codes

The listings here show a useful selection of the HTML special characters with their codes, plus the Unicode decimal value for each symbol. Just to be fancy, these are often referred to as 'Entity Codes'. In some cases symbols are included for which no HTML special character codes are available. See the section on Alternative ways to insert symbols to utilize the Unicode values. Notice that some character codes are case sensitive. For example, the letter Ä is produced by the code Ä and the letter ä is produced by ä.

There are some characters that cannot be directly typed into the text of web pages either because your keyboard does not support them or because of limitations set by HTML. For example, if extra spaces are added between words, the browser will ignore these and place a single space after each word regardless. So how are extra spaces added? By using the special character code for the space character. Here is an example;

Here is some text                 with spaces                 between the words

and here is what the HTML script looks like;

	
<p>	Here is some text &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 
	with spaces &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
	between the words
</p>

Not exactly elegant, but it does the job. The text is separated out by the 'none-break space' character; or at least, it's special character code. Each special character code is preceded by an ampersand "&" and followed by a semicolon ";".

Many of the symbols listed here such as $ & € can in fact be typed straight in if your keyboard supports them. Although all browsers will render an "&" symbol correctly when you type it into your text, it is not considered valid by the W3C and may cause ambiguous output in some circumstances. They recommend replacing it with the "&amp;" entity code. In particular, the "<" symbol will cause trouble if you type it into your html text because it will of course be interpreted as a tag opening operator. You will need to replace it with the "&lt;" entity code in your text to get the desired effect.

Alternative ways to render symbols

Direct character value entry

The entire range of symbols may in fact be entered directly from the keyboard. Each character has a unique numeric value shown in the right hand value column of these tables. This value can be entered while holding down the Alt key. To do this, you will need to use the number pad with numlock set on - not the number keys at the top of the keyboard. However, be aware that the ability to type characters directly into your text does not guarantee that they will be rendered as you want by browsers since they are subject to the same limitations set by HTML as any other typed character.

The entire Unicode repertoire of character values contains over 100,000 symbols which are contained in a range of encoding sets (tables to you and me) that go beyond the scope of this document. There are different internationalized encodings of Unicode which include character sets relevant to the geographic region for which the version is implemented. The complete Unicode repertoire continues to be added to and contains almost every symbol in use for human written communication. A more exhaustive set of character codes is to be found at http://unicode.org/charts.

Indirect character value entry

A final method of writing special characters is to type the actual numeric character values discussed above into your HTML script. They needs to be formatted so that browsers will know how to interpret them. Here is an example;

The temperature is 20°c.

and here is what the HTML script looks like;

<p>  The temperature is 20&#176;c.	</p>

The numeric value of the character shown in the right hand column of the tables above is preceded by "&#" and followed by a semicolon ";". The number that represents each symbol can vary depending on the character encoding that has been specified with the Content-Type meta tag¹ in the page header element. This means that if the character renders correctly in your browser, it should in theory work correctly in any browser. In practice this is not always the case. Safari in particular appears to have a somewhat limited embedded character set at the time of writing and will render unresolvable characters as a square. HTML imposes no restriction on which characters may be used by this method with the proviso that values 0 - 31 and 128 - 159 are not usable. These are reserved values and will not render predictably.

1 In order that web pages render as expected across all browsers, they must contain a Content-Type meta tag which specifies the Unicode character encoding to be used. If your web pages are written in English, then the following tag or one similar should be pasted into the top of the head element of every page you create;

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />.

If you generally write pages in another language, you need to identify a suitable character set encoding for your language of choice.