Tech Stuff - HTML Character Entity Encoding

Mercifully short character code overview. An apparently simple subject which turns out to be brutally complicated - well to our modest brains.

This stuff (and more) is contained in Chapter 24 of the current HTML 4.01 spec (the last ever version of HTML - its all XHTML now) which you can get (and lots of other great stuff) from the W3C site including their fantastic page validation services.

If you find it useful - print it, stick it on your wall - and save our bandwidth!!

The reason you can never find this stuff is because the most popular values confusingly belong to a number of character sets.

There are two encoding forms supported by most browsers

• a character name format e.g. © = ©
• a numeric format e.g. © = ©

Both formats are shown in the tables below. If you are using anything obscure or have to deal with old browsers (< v3 ish) you should stick to the numeric format only.

For convenience we show some popular values (from a number of character sets) in a single table then the full Latin-1 (ISO8859-1) table. If you are into the greek alphabet for obscure mathematical symbols - you are out of luck. Go the the W3C click on HTML then go for Chapter 24 of the latest spec - they are all there.

This lot should all display on most browsers. However in the tables below the column DN shows the result of using the name format encoding in your browser and the column D# shows the result using the numeric format. If there is no character in one or other of these column (except the space, dummy!) then your browser does not handle that format correctly.

Here is the full list of character entities for accented characters and miscellaneous symbols in the Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) character set. Values in the range 00 to 7F (the ASCII/IA5 set in this table) are typically used as raw characters with the exceptions of the special characters used for HTML encoding as shown above (<, >, & and ") but they can be represented as HTML entities by using the ASCII/IA5 decimal number, for example ',' (comma) has a decimal vale of 44 (in the ASCII/IA5 table and may be represented as a HTML entity by encoding as &#44;.

Problems, comments, suggestions, corrections (including broken links) or something to add? Please take the time from a busy life to 'mail us' (at top of screen), the webmaster (below) or info-support at zytrax. You will have a warm inner glow for the rest of the day.